Vision and mission

Ocean surface is the location of strong exchanges with the atmosphere but also with ice and continents. Ship based underway measurements can make a significant contribution to the observation of this very active layer on condition that the datasets produced would be properly qualified and assembled.

GOSUD aims at assembling in-situ observations of the world ocean surface collected by a variety of ships and at distributing quality controlled datasets.  At present time the variables considered by GOSUD are temperature and salinity.

To reach this objective, GOSUD strategy is to work on the following aspects:

• Establish direct contact with the data collectors in order to facilitate all stages of the process from data acquisition to data transmission and feed back on the data quality.
• Encourage standard procedures for instrument settings and maintenance, water samples analysis, real time quality control and delayed mode processing and provide the corresponding documentations.
• Ensure real time transmission and apply automatic quality controls on the real time dataflow.
• Fully document the delayed mode datasets through meta data and links to publications.
• Facilitate the data access by a large community of users by offering fully documented datasets and products.
• Highlight the synthetic products based on the GOSUD datasets developed by scientific organisations.