INTEGRATING OCEANOGRAPHIC DATA INTO GIS – WORKING WITH BOTH IN-SITU AND GRIDDED DATA

Nazila Merati¹, Tiffany C. Vance², Jason Fabritz¹, Mick Spillane¹, Jon Callahan¹ and Don Denbo¹

¹ NOAA, Office of Atmospheric Research, Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Ocean Climate Research Division, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, U.S.A. nazila.merati@noaa.gov; jasonf@pmel.noaa.gov; spillane@pmel.noaa.gov; Callahan@pmel.noaa.gov

² NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Resource Assessment Conservation Engineering, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, U.S.A. Tiffany.C.Vance@noaa.gov

Ocean scientists are beginning to incorporate the use of GIS into data visualization, data management and analysis. At NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL), software tools have been developed to help scientists select, process and convert their in-situ data sets into a GIS-usable format. EPIC is a tool that allows scientist to manage, display and analyze CTD, XBT, time series and bottle data. Access to PMEL’s data repository is available via the World Wide Web. The EPIC Web Browser allows users to select data using various search criteria. Once data are selected, users may display the data and download the data for conversion to a GIS format. The conversion of data uses a JAVA application developed at PMEL. Csv2shp allows users to convert .csv files to an ESRI specified shapefile format independently of the ESRI software environment.

Climatologies and other gridded data sets are available for download from PMEL using the Live Access Server. The Live Access Server (LAS) allows users to connect to remote data servers using a seamless web interface. LAS interface allows users to select data by geographic region and by variable type. Data are available for download as either ascii text or ArcView Grid Format to add to ArcView or ArcMap sessions.

Ncbrowse is a software application developed at PMEL that allows users to browse netCDF files, subsetting the data and saving the data to a text file that can be converted to a shapfile. Ncbrowse allows GIS users to explore their data in 1and 2 d space.

In this presentation, we will create a GIS project using tools developed at PMEL and provide links to other research groups working to make oceanographic data accessible to the marine community.