NGDC BEST PRACTICES AND SOLUTIONS FOR MARINE GEOPHYSICAL AND GEOLOGICAL DATA STEWARDSHIP

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) in Boulder Colorado is the national archive for NOAA and University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) marine trackline data. NGDC also operates the international data centers, the ICSU World Data Center for Geophysics and Marine Geology and the IHO Data Center for Digital Bathymetry. Using best practices, NGDC stewards over 73 Terabytes of geological and geophysical data dating back to the 1800's including multibeam, singlebeam, sidescan sonar, seismic, borehole geophysics, bottom samples, gravity and magnetics. NGDC provides these data on-line in a variety of formats via interactive maps and standard web services with an average of 4 million web hits delivering an average of 10 Terabytes of data per month. To insure interoperability, NGDC adheres to national and international standards including FGDC/ISO for metadata and Open GIS Consortium for web services. This paper focus on the methods and systems, built primarily from commercial-off-the-shelf software, for ingesting, describing, archiving, and serving marine science data and derived products.