Project: North Atlantic Dark Data: Rings

Recent changes in NSF and other agency data policies (NSF11060, 2011; OSTP memo 2013) mandating timely and open access to data and information generated in the course of US funded research have resulted in a relatively rapid change in the culture of data sharing. Technological advances, policy changes, and increased awareness of the need for and benefits of well-curated data make it much more likely that recently generated research results will be made publicly available and in a timely manner. However, many scientific data were generated at a time when the technology for curation, storage, and dissemination were primitive or non-existent, and data sharing was not viewed as essential. In addition, many of the datasets were created by projects that make up the "long tail", smaller projects that form the bulk of the projects funded by agencies such as NSF (Heidorn, 2008). Data from these projects have in the past been poorly curated and thus less visible to other scientists, largely not available, and hence named "Dark Data" (Heidorn, 2008). But as Sinha et al. (2013) emphasize, without access to the types of historical observations or legacy data that make up the “dark data” in the “long tail” of science, emerging scientific challenges will not be addressable. "...making these data available on demand must be one of the highest priorities for any enterprise seeking to develop a cyberinfrastructure capable of promoting new ways to examine the earth system through time" (Sinha et al., 2013). The paucity of marine ecosystem data available to conduct cutting edge research and the critical need for the rescue of past data were also highlighted in a recent EarthCube End-User Domain Workshop Report "Articulating Cyberinfrastructure Needs of the Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics Community" (Kinkade et al., 2013). (from proposal to NSF, 2014)

There are significant dark datasets currently unavailable from multidisciplinary programs funded in the 1970’s and 1980’s such as those from the Northwest Atlantic cold-core and warm-core rings (The Ring Group, 1981; Joyce and Wiebe, 1983). The bulk of the data served here will be from the Rings projects.

The Cold-Core Rings (CCR) studies, [1972-1976] and Warm-Core Rings (WCR) Program, [1981-1982], were major research projects in the 1970s and 1980s.  Large oceanic eddies or rings form when Gulf Stream waters first meander, then separate, forming a ring of Gulf Stream water around a core of cold Slope Water or a core of warm Sargasso Sea water.  The CCRs move south or southwest from their point of origin into the Sargasso Sea and are initially 150-300 kilometers in diameter and 2500-3500 meters deep.  They can persist as identifiable features for up to 2 years.  WCRs move to the west/southwest in the Slope Water north of the Gulf Stream. They are 100 to 200 km in diameter, extend to at least 1500 m deep, and exist for a shorter period of time (usually less than a year) before gradually breaking up and rejoining the Gulf Stream.  Both of these kinds of rings form about 5 to 8 times a year.

Rings are particularly interesting to the biologist because species living north and south of the Gulf Stream are distinctly different. Thus temperate species from the Slope Water or tropical-subtropical species from the Sargasso Sea are isolated during ring formation within their particular ring structure.  Thus, a community of animals from one area is expatriated in the territory of another community of animals.  As a ring decays, the water gradually takes on the physical and chemical characteristics of the surrounding non-ring water. Species outside the ring invade the ring habitat while those expatriated go to local extinction. This phenomenon provides for a large-scale natural ecological experiment that was the focus of the ring’s studies. 

This project is digitizing data from 33 cruises to the Northwest Atlantic Ocean that are locked in notebooks and old digital file formats and preparing them for serving online in a publically available data repository (BCO-DMO).

Each dataset has been the subject of extensive data recovery efforts and the work is continuing.

References:

Heidorn, P.B. (2008). Shedding light on the dark data in the long tail of science. Library Trends, 57(2), 280-299. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lib.0.0036

Joyce, T.M., & Wiebe, P.H. (1983). Warm core rings of the Gulf Stream. Oceanus, 26(2), 34-44.

Kinkade, D., Chandler, C., Glover, D., Groman, R., Kline, D., Nahorniak, J., O'Brien, T., Perry, M.J., Pierson, J., & Wiebe, P. (2013). Articulating cyberinfrastructure needs of the ocean ecosystem dynamics community. Earthcube End-User Domain Workshop Report. Final report submitted to earthcube.org. Summary at http://workspace.earthcube.org/sites/default/files/files/document-repository/OceanEcosystemDynamicsEndUserWorkshop.pdf

Wiebe et al, 1976. Gulf stream cold core rings: large-scale interaction sites for open ocean plankton communities. Deep-Sea Res. 23:695-710

NSF11060. U.S. National Science Foundation. (2011). Division of Ocean Sciences sample and data policy (document number nsf11060). Retrieved from http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11060/nsf11060.pdf

OSTP Memo 2013. U.S. Office of Science and Technology. Increasing access to the results of federally funded scientific research. Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf

Ring Group (Backus, R.H., G.R. Flierl, D. Kester, D.B. Olson, D. Richardson, A. Vastano, P.H. Wiebe and J. Wormuth). (1981). Gulf Stream cold core rings: Their physics, chemistry, and biology. Science, 212, 1091-1100.

Sinha, A.K., Thessen, A.E., & Barnes, C.G. (2013). Geoinformatics: towards an integrative view of Earth as a system. In Bickford, M.E. (ed.), The Web of Geological Sciences: Advances, Impacts, and Interactions (GSA Special Paper 500, pp. 591-604). Geological Society of America. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/2013.2500(19)

(These data were originally collected under NSF Award OCE-8017248 and others.)