Welcome to OCADS

The Ocean Carbon and Acidification Data System (OCADS) is a data management project within NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in Silver Spring, Maryland, United States. OCADS specializes in the management of ocean carbon and ocean acidification (OA) data and is committed to providing the best data management services to support regional to global ocean carbon cycling and OA research. We value the importance of making all OA data available through one place and welcome data submissions from around the world.

About OCADS

OCADS is a merger of two former OA data management projects at NCEI, i.e., Ocean Acidification Data Stewardship (OADS, founded in 2012) and the Ocean Carbon Data System (OCADS, founded in 2017). The primary mission of the new OCADS project is to serve the OA research community and work closely with our data partners to: (a) safeguard OA data into NCEI's archives to ensure long-term access (>75 years), (b) provide the best data management services to meet the needs of the international OA research community, and (c) help investigators fulfill the data management requirements from their funders and publishers. Our services include dedicated support for data acquisition, long-term archiving, management of rich metadata information, application of controlled vocabularies, stable data citation with digital object identifiers (DOIs), online data discovery and access, and data management support for OA product developments. The scope of data we manage includes observational OA data (e.g., chemical, physical, and biological OA data), laboratory experiment-based OA data, model outputs, and socioeconomic OA data. It is our unwavering commitment to bring the scientific expertise from the research community to our data management world and offer a customer-centric service. All feedback is welcome.

Acknowledgements

The OCADS project is funded by NOAA Ocean Acidification Program (OAP), NOAA Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program (GOMO), and NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

We thank NCEI's Data Stewardship Division (DSD), especially John Relph for helping us implement many aspects of the OCADS infrastructure, including the Rich Metadata Management System (RMMS), and the Scientific Data Information System (SDIS) automation program. We thank Joseph "Jack" Rhodes, Glen Reid, and John Cartwright for helping implement the new OCADS Data Portal, and the Mooring Data Viewer. We are grateful to Eugene Burger's group at NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) for developing and maintaining the SDIS. Most importantly, we want to thank all the individuals who provided their comments to help make OCADS better.