Producing marine geophysical archive files from raw underway data

Hamilton, Michael; Wessel, Paul; Taylor, Brian; Luis, Joaquim

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/14152

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Preserving costly marine geophysical trackline data is of paramount importance but variability in priorities, funding, personnel, and technology impact our data archival capacity. We have addressed one crucial facet of this dilemma by devising an open source approach to merge and reduce underway geophysical data and to generate marine geophysical archive files using common command line programs along with the Generic Mapping Tools and its mgd77 supplement. Archive files generated using this approach retain full precision and may be converted automatically to MGD77T, MGD77+, as well as MGD77 formats. We successfully applied the approach to 340 geophysical data sets acquired by R/V Kilo Moana from 2002 to 2018 and in the near term we plan to submit the non-proprietary archive files to the National Centers for Environmental Information's trackline geophysics archive. We encourage international oceanographic communities to explore our methodology as a larger user-base will strengthen the software and the procedures.