Welcome to OCADS

The Ocean Carbon and Acidification Data System (OCADS) is a data management project, specializing in ocean carbon and acidification data (loosely referred to as OA data hereafter), within NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. We are committed to providing the best data management experiences to support international ocean carbon and acidification research.

About OCADS

OCADS is a merger of the two former NCEI OA data management projects: Ocean Acidification Data Stewardship (OADS) and the Ocean Carbon Data System (OCADS). The primary missions of OCADS are to work closely with our external data partners to: (a) provide data management services to meet the scientific needs of the international OA research community; (b) safeguard OA data into archives to ensure long-term access (>75 years); and (c) help customers fulfill the data management requirements from their funders and publishers.

Our services include dedicated support for data acquisition, management of rich metadata, application of controlled vocabularies, long-term archiving, stable data citation, online data discovery and access services, and data management support for product developments. The scope of data we manage includes both observational and laboratory experiment-based OA data (including physical, chemical, and biological OA data), as well as model output and socioeconomic OA data.

We value the importance of making all OA data available through one place and encourage data submissions from all over the world. OCADS is committed to bringing the expertise from the scientific community to our data management effort and offering a customer centric service. All feedback is welcome.

Important role of OCADS

The ocean has been playing an important role in slowing global climate change by absorbing between 20% and 30% of all the anthropogenic carbon dioxide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. However, decades of ocean observations show that carbon dioxide absorption is changing the chemistry of seawater, increasing the acidity of the ocean, a phenomenon commonly referred to as ocean acidification (OA). The OCADS data management system has been playing a critical role in providing data management support for the regional to international research of both global climate change and ocean acidification.

Acknowledgements

Funding for the OCADS project comes from the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program (OAP) and NOAA/NESDIS/National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). OCADS benefitted from support from the Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing (GOMO) and NASA from 2017-2019.