Observing System Monitoring Center

INTRODUCTION
Understanding climate variability requires the development, maintenance and evaluation of a sustained global climate observing system. The purpose of the Observing System Monitoring Center (OSMC), which is being funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Office of Climate Observation (OCO), is to provide a tool that will assist managers and scientists with monitoring the performance of the global in-situ ocean observing system, identifying problems in real-time, and evaluating the adequacy of the observations in support of ocean/climate state estimation, forecasting and research.

BACKGROUND
The Observing System Monitoring Center (OSMC) system was initially developed as an information gathering, decision support, and display system for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Office of Climate Observations (OCO) located in Silver Spring, MD. It is an essential component of a sustained Ocean Observing System for Climate, that permits many discrete components to be visualized and managed as a system. The OSMC system displays current and historical status of globally distributed meteorological and oceanographic data collection systems. The OSMC system provides data visualization tools to identify the coverage of any given collection of platforms and parameters. These visualization tools are available via the internet and can be used to present information from OSMC to other NOAA centers, national partners, and international partners.

OSMC COMPONENTS
The OSMC is primarily built of two components -- a data base of metadata and tools to assist with the interpretation of that metadata.

A DATABASE OF METADATA
At its core, the OSMC is database of metadata, which is focused on both real time and historical observations. The primary source of the real time metadata is the Global Telecommunications System (GTS). On a daily basis, metadata (and some data) is pulled from the GTS and ingested into an Oracle database. This database is then used to drive the different OSMC tools to assist in monitoring the global ocean observing system.

As part of the metadata discovery process, much of our metadata is mined from our partners at JCOMMOPS. We continue to work with them to improve our metadata and platform identification.

OSMC TOOLS
The tools for interpretation of the metadata include those that give the user a visual overview of the global ocean observing system, and those that drill down and discover metadata associated with specific observations. These tools provide both observing system managers and scientists insight as to where the global ocean observing system is meeting expectations as well identifying regions which may be excellent candidates for observing system expansion.

There are several tools which serve to give the user a visual overview of the global ocean observing system. These tools can be accessed in the the "OSMC Viewers" section of the site.

OSMC Presentations, publications, etc

The Observing System Monitoring Center: Moving Towards Climate Data Integration. Presented at the 2009 AGU meeting in San Francisco, CA
Incorporating SAMOS/GOSUD data into the Observing System Monitoring Center. Presented at the 2008 SAMOS/GOSUD joint meeting in Seattle, WA
An Introduction to the Observiing system monitoring center. Presented at the 2008 AMS meeting in New Orleans, LA. Here's the pdf document