One of the EuroGO-SHIP RI objectives is to increase the quality, traceability and availability of hydrographic data. This is particularly difficult when observations are fragmented, conducted nation-by-nation or even institution-by-institution. A way to reduce this data fragmentation is creating data products that combine, format and quality control data from different cruises, laboratories, slight different methods, i.e., different quality standards. 

Merging data sets to create data synthesis products raises the need for a careful examination and quantification of the uncertainty in the gathered data. EuroGO-SHIP provides a framework to coherently quantify the final product uncertainty, which will increase its usability to, for example, robustly estimate the three main threads of Global Change (warming, deoxygenation and ocean acidification) to open and coastal ocean ecosystems.  

The Global Ocean Data Analysis Project (GLODAP) is a cooperative international effort that synthesizes oceanographic data from surface to bottom to create a high-quality, global and public dataset of physical and biogeochemical properties from ship-based observations. GLODAP is the paradigm of ocean data products, started in the 2000s with timing updates sustained by very low funding.

The presentation provides an overview of the framework with two case studies and envisions its exploitability and implementation within future updates of GLODAP.

The full study and results are described here: D2.4 Defining a framework for estimating uncertainty as part of a secondary quality control (2QC) procedure