ICOS – Marine

Carbon

About

ICOS is an international organisation of thirteen European member countries and over 130 greenhouse gas measurement stations aimed at quantifying and understanding the greenhouse gas balance of Europe and neighbouring regions. ICOS data is made available at the Carbon Portal, a one-stop shop for all ICOS data products. The Ocean Thematic Centre is one of four central facilities within the European research infrastructure Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS).

The marine element of ICOS provides long-term oceanic observations, which are required to understand the present state and better predict future behaviour of the global carbon cycle and climaterelevant gas emissions. The Ocean Thematic Centre currently coordinates twenty-one ocean stations from seven countries monitoring carbon uptake and fluxes in the North Atlantic, Nordic Seas, Baltic, and the Mediterranean Sea. Measuring methods include sampling from research vessels, moorings, buoys, and commercial vessels that have been equipped with state-of-the-art carbonate system sensors. The objective is to ensure high quality measurements of greenhouse gas concentrations that are independent, transparent and reliable. In turn, this monitoring system will support governments in their efforts to mitigate climate change as well as holding them accountable for reaching their mitigation targets.

Type & number of data sets

The ICOS Carbon Portal provides observation data from over 130 greenhouse gas measurement stations. Through the SOCAT portal there are around 6000 trajectories available from 1957-2018 with 26 million data values.

Core Services

This concerns two relevant portals: ICOS Carbon Portal with data discovery and access and SOCAT portal with data products. Several services are available for both. Data from official certified ICOS stations can be accessed at the ICOS Carbon Portal and on an international scale including non ICOS data at the SOCAT Portal. Web services for discovery are existing, but it might be needed to specify and develop API’s for data access as part of the Blue-Cloud activities.

Function in Blue-Cloud

ICOS is one of the nine complementary data infrastructures, that is federated as part of the Blue-Cloud Data Discovery & Access Service. This way, it and serves as the pillars of the initial Blue-Cloud framework. The University of Bergen is contributing, with other partners of the project, to the Blue-Cloud Demonstrator “Marine Environmental Indicators”.

This pilot Demonstrator aims to showcase an online service with an associated cloud-based analytical computing framework and a dedicated web interface to provide and display indicators and information on the environmental quality of the ocean, for the benefit of both researchers and policymakers.

ICOS