OPEN DATA, COLLABORATIVE WORKING PLATFORMS, AND INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION: BUILDING AN EARLY CAREER SCIENTIST COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE TO LEVERAGE OCEAN OBSERVATORIES INITIATIVE DATA TO ADDRESS CRITICAL QUESTIONS IN MARINE SCIENCE

Ocean observing systems are well-recognized as platforms for long-term monitoring of near-shore and remote locations in the global ocean. The arrays of the NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) are among the most advanced of these platforms in the world and have the potential to enhance our capacity for addressing critical issues such as climate change, ecosystem variability and ocean acidification. Co-located sensors measure key variables to describe forcing and exchanges at the air-sea and ocean-earth boundaries and throughout the water column off the US coasts and in the Irminger Sea. This high-quality data is freely available and accessible to all members of the global oceanographic community—a democratization of data that is particularly useful for early career scientists (ECS) to conduct research independent of traditional funding models. The full impact of these data is realized with knowledge and methods from diverse disciplines that ECS are particularly qualified for. We showcase two data interrogation approaches using OOI data to characterize physical-chemical-biological coupling.

First, we demonstrate an event-driven method to interrogate wide-ranging data collected during Post-Tropical Storm Michael, which exploits concurrent diverse OOI data measurements. Broad ECS knowledge and computational skills allowed identification of data issues and technologically-sound characterization of data from multiple sensor packages.

Second, we demonstrate the potential for predictive analysis – using a combination of data streams, we remove known signals and identify anomalous events. Here we present an example where this tool identified anomalous sea level data and explored other datasets to characterize bed-sea-atmosphere dynamics during the event.

While the above examples are specific, the lesson is broad – an ECS-driven approach that emphasizes collaborative and interdisciplinary working practices adds significant value to existing datasets and programs (like OOI) and has the potential to produce meaningful scientific advances. These findings present an argument for building a community of practice to augment ECS ocean scientist skills and foster ECS collaborations to broaden the context, reach, and societal utility of ocean science.