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The Quota Project is aimed at building a high quality upper
ocean temperature dataset for the Indian Ocean and the
South-western Pacific (east of the dateline). This should allow
close examination of the seasonal cycle of storage and advection
in the upper ocean, and in particular the cycles of equatorial
and boundary currents. Such a climatology could help provide a
more accurate basis for model inter-comparisons. It also allows
better tracking of changes in the ocean through time. The QuOTA
project involves
NOAA-IPRC and CMAR
jointly undertaking to build a very high quality ocean thermal
data archive by applying methods and expertise developed through
the NOAA-IPRC/CMAR IOTA (Indian Ocean Thermal Archive)
collaboration which was established in 1998.
Quality control of the data is done by automated processes,
followed by 'hand-QC' of data that fails the automated test.
This results in a data set containing very little 'bad' data and
any that remains is usually subtly faulty, having little impact
on most analyses.
A description of the
software used to hand-QC the data (Mquest), and the software is
available
here. Download the paper describing the process in detail (Gronell,
A., and S.E. Wijffels. 2008. A Semiautomated Approach for
Quality Controlling Large Historical Ocean Temperature Archives.
Journal Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology. v25, pp990-1003)
QuOTA regions: The red area is the Indian Ocean
region, green is the Tasman/Pacific Ocean region.
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