20th Argo Data Management Team annual meeting

The twentieth Argo Data Management Team (ADMT) meeting was hosted by Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche-sur-mer (LOV), France, on the week 13-18 October 2019, gathering 90 participants from 13 countries and 30 institutes. Germany, Italy, France, Norway and UK were represented.

The Argo Data Management Team annual meeting is a time for the data managers who contribute to Argo to come together and discuss technical matters pertaining to the international Argo data stream.

The progress made since last year regarding the quality of Argo data processing in real time and delayed mode was reviewed and ways to progress further were discussed, both for core and Biogeochemical Argo.

The morning of the 14th was dedicated to a Euro-Argo RISE WP4 meeting on the organisation of Biogeochemical Argo data management in Europe (task 4.2), led by Sorbonne University. A Biogeochemical Argo Data Management meeting was held on 14-15 October, followed by an ADMT executive committee, prior to the plenary sessions for the ADMT on 16-18 October.

This year, the ADMT week also included an Argo visualization and web app do-a-thon on Sunday 13 October and Monday morning 14 October, that gathered about 30 people. The workshop started with a review of existing Argo visualisation websites (including the European fleet monitoring tool developed with the MOCCA project), followed by some general discussion about how to move these visualisations forward in a more collaborative way. The need for improving data services at the GDACs was identified, as well as a need for an overall guide for data access, data display on websites and APIs. Work performed in the Euro-Argo RISE project (WP7) was presented and should help in moving forward in that direction (including the user needs assessment task started by the Marine Institute). The need for working more generally on “Argo outreach” was also identified, and a working group was set-up to continue the discussion on that subject (social medias best practices, scientific outreach media, etc.) in which Euro-Argo ERIC office stepped in.

During the plenary ADMT session, several results from studies performed in the framework of MOCCA were presented:

- early drift detection thanks to comparison of data with a min/max climatology

- improvement of the spike test

- improvement of the reference database for DMQC in the Mediterranean Sea

- characterisation of Argo float profiles associated with Antarctic Circumpolar Current fronts and zones

A presentation was made also by Sylvie Pouliquen on results expected in terms of Argo Data Management in the starting H2020 projects Euro-Argo RISE and ENVRI-FAIR, in which Euro-Argo is strongly involved. Some ongoing work within Euro-Argo RISE project (DMQC cookbook, proposal on quality control software conversion) were also introduced by some participants.

All the presentations made during the week as well as supporting documents (agenda, national reports, etc.) are available here.

The meeting report will be available at the end of the year on the same webpage.