Explore the vast range of titles available.

More than 30 years of observations from an international suite of satellite altimeter missions continue to provide key data enabling research discoveries and a broad spectrum of operational and user-driven applications. These missions were designed to advance technologies and to answer scientific questions about ocean circulation, ocean heat content, and the impact of climate change on these Earth systems. They are also a valuable resource for the operational needs of oceanographic and weather forecasting agencies that provide information to shipping and fishing vessels and offshore operations for route optimization and safety, as well as for other decision makers in coastal, water resources, and disaster management fields. This time series of precise measurements of ocean surface topography (OST)—the “hills and valleys” of the ocean surface—reveals changes in ocean dynamic topography, tracks sea level variations at global to regional scales, and provides key information about ocean trends reflecting climate change in our warming world. Advancing technologies in new satellite systems allows measurements at higher spatial resolution ever closer to coastlines, where the impacts of storms, waves, and sea level rise on coastal communities and infrastructure are manifest. We review some collaborative efforts of international space agencies, including NASA, CNES, NOAA, ESA, and EUMETSAT, which have contributed to a collection of use cases of satellite altimetry in operational and decision-support contexts. The extended time series of ocean surface topography measurements obtained from these satellite altimeter missions, along with advances in satellite technology that have allowed for higher resolution measurements nearer to coasts, has enabled a range of such applications. The resulting body of knowledge and data enables better assessments of storms, waves, and sea level rise impacts on coastal communities and infrastructure amongst other key contributions for societal benefit. Although not exhaustive, this review provides a broad overview with specific examples of the important role of satellite altimetry in ocean and coastal applications, thus justifying the significant resource contributions made by international space agencies in the development of these missions.

From 11 April to 11 June 2018 a new type of ocean observing platform, the Saildrone surface vehicle, collected data on a round-trip, 60-day cruise from San Francisco Bay, down the U.S. and Mexican coast to Guadalupe Island. The cruise track was selected to optimize the science team’s validation and science objectives. The validation objectives include establishing the accuracy of these new measurements. The scientific objectives include validation of satellite-derived fluxes, sea surface temperatures, and wind vectors and studies of upwelling dynamics, river plumes, air–sea interactions including frontal regions, and diurnal warming regions. On this deployment, the Saildrone carried 16 atmospheric and oceanographic sensors. Future planned cruises (with open data policies) are focused on improving our understanding of air–sea fluxes in the Arctic Ocean and around North Brazil Current rings.

The 10th Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Applications Meeting, held one year after the satellite's launch, highlighted significant milestones in mission progress and showcased the innovative work of SWOT Early Adopters (EA) using mission data products. Over 100 participants from diverse sectors convened to discuss operational applications leveraging SWOT's unprecedented water surface measurements. The meeting emphasized applied science efforts to enhance hydrology and oceanographic models. This summary highlights the breadth of operational and private‐sector uses of SWOT data, emphasizing its potential to drive new innovations and deliver societal benefits, such as improved water resource management, flood prediction, and climate resilience.

Electronic tags have been used widely for more than a decade in studies of diverse marine species. However, despite significant investment in tagging programs and hardware, data management aspects have received insufficient attention, leaving researchers without a comprehensive toolset to manage their data easily. The growing volume of these data holdings, the large diversity of tag types and data formats, and the general lack of data management resources are not only complicating integration and synthesis of electronic tagging data in support of resource management applications but potentially threatening the integrity and longer-term access to these valuable datasets. To address this critical gap, Tagbase has been developed as a well-rounded, yet accessible data management solution for electronic tagging applications. It is based on a unified relational model that accommodates a suite of manufacturer tag data formats in addition to deployment metadata and reprocessed geopositions. Tagbase includes an integrated set of tools for importing tag datasets into the system effortlessly, and provides reporting utilities to interactively view standard outputs in graphical and tabular form. Data from the system can also be easily exported or dynamically coupled to GIS and other analysis packages. Tagbase is scalable and has been ported to a range of database management systems to support the needs of the tagging community, from individual investigators to large scale tagging programs. Tagbase represents a mature initiative with users at several institutions involved in marine electronic tagging research.

The data management landscape associated with the Global Ocean Observing System is distributed, complex, and only loosely coordinated. Yet interoperability across this distributed landscape is essential to enable data to be reused, preserved, and integrated and to minimize costs in the process. A building block for a distributed system in which component systems can exchange and understand information is standardization of data formats, distribution protocols, and metadata. By reviewing several data management use cases we attempt to characterize the current state of ocean data interoperability and make suggestions for continued evolution of the interoperability standards underpinning the data system. We reaffirm the technical data standard recommendations from previous OceanObs conferences and suggest incremental improvements to them that can help the GOOS data system address the significant challenges that remain in order to develop a truly multidisciplinary data system.

The goal in this commentary is to share the development of the NASA Applied Science pre‐launch protocol called the Early Adopter Program (EAP) that is designed to build user‐readiness of planned satellite Earth observing missions proactively and before the launch. Here we focus in particular on the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite mission EAP as an illustration of benefits of such a program of proactive and sustained user community engagement. Such a commentary will be of value to other satellite Earth observation missions that are currently in service, scheduled for launch or prioritized for development in the near future. Plain Language Summary The commentary sheds light on the many years of preparation for a planned satellite mission for surface water (Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission) to make the data as user‐ready as possible. We believe such a commentary may be of interest to other communities involved in planning, operation or use of other satellite missions. Key Points Planned satellite earth missions today require proactive engagement with a broad user community The Surface Water and Ocean Topography Early Adopter program represents the start of what is possible through sustained engagement with stakeholder community Such early engagement is a template for other planned satellite Earth missions to maximize the return on public investments in such missions

This article examines the future governance of areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) in the wake of the new 2023 United Nations Agreement using the work on the Sargasso Sea as a prototype. After discussing the legal framework and current challenges facing the ABNJ regime, some details are provided on open ocean data collection technologies, including big data and artificial intelligence (AI), used in support of ocean governance. Based on a technology-enabled ocean governance cycle, the role that data, information technology and data-science can play in incorporating empirical scientific knowledge into policy and decision-making is examined with a focus on the open ocean. The article concludes with a vision of future high seas governance based on the 2023 Agreement and how big data and AI can play a crucial role in meeting the exciting challenges that the new agreement poses.

An Integrated Science Data Analytics Platform is an environment that enables the confluence of resources for scientific investigation. It harmonizes data, tools and computational resources to enable the research community to focus on the investigation rather than spending time on security, data preparation, management, etc. OceanWorks is a NASA technology integration project to establish a cloud-based Integrated Ocean Science Data Analytics Platform for big ocean science at NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) for big ocean science. It focuses on advancement and maturity by bringing together several NASA open-source, big data projects for parallel analytics, anomaly detection, in situ to satellite data matchup, quality-screened data subsetting, search relevancy, and data discovery. Our communities are relying on data available through distributed data centers to conduct their research. In typical investigations, scientists would (1) search for data, (2) evaluate the relevance of that data, (3) download it, and (4) then apply algorithms to identify trends, anomalies, or other attributes of the data. Such a workflow cannot scale if the research involves a massive amount of data or multi-variate measurements. With the upcoming NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission expected to produce over 20PB of observational data during its 3-year nominal mission, the volume of data will challenge all existing Earth Science data archival, distribution and analysis paradigms. This paper discusses how OceanWorks enhances the analysis of physical ocean data where the computation is done on an elastic cloud platform next to the archive to deliver fast, web-accessible services for working with oceanographic measurements.

For nearly three decades, satellite nadir altimeters have provided essential information to understand primarily ocean but also inland water dynamics. A variety of parameters can be inferred via altimeter measurements, including sea surface height, sea surface wind speeds, significant wave heights, and topography of land, sea ice, and ice sheets. Taking advantage of these parameters with the long record of altimeter data spanning multiple decades has allowed a diverse range of societal applications. As the constellation of altimeter satellites grows, the proven value of the missions to a diverse user community can now be demonstrated by highlighting a selection of verifiable success stories. In this paper, we review selected altimeter success stories that incorporate altimetry data, alone or in conjunction with numerical models or other Earth observations, to solve a key societal problem. First, we define the problem or the key challenge of each use case, and then we articulate the uptake of the successful altimeter-based solution. Our review revealed steady progress by scientific and stakeholder communities in bridging the gap between data availability and their actual uptake to address a variety of applications. Highlighting these altimeter-based success stories can serve to further promote the widespread adoption of future satellite missions such as the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission scheduled for launch in 2022. Knowledge of the breadth of current utility of altimeter observations can help the scientific community to demonstrate the value in continuing radar altimeter and similar missions, particularly those with expanded capabilities, such as SWOT.

This paper describes the large, diverse set of in situ data collected during the Salinity Processes in the Upper-ocean Regional Study 2 (SPURS-2) field campaign. The data set includes measurements of the ocean, atmosphere, and fluxes between atmosphere and ocean; measurements of the skin surface layer, bulk mixed layer, and deeper water; (mostly) physical, chemical, and biological measurements; and ship-based, mobile drifting/floating, and moored observations. We include references detailing the methods for collection of each data set, provide DOIs for accessing the data, and note some papers in this special issue that use them. To facilitate broader access to SPURS-2 data and information, we created an online tool that allows users to explore data sets organized by various categories (e.g., instrument type, mobility, depth). This tool will complement content available from the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) and will be highly engaging for visual learners.