GOSUD data are provided by volunteer contributors who are willing to build freely accessible global datasets, promote standard methodologies and agree on common data policy. The observations are collected from different categories of platforms such as research vessels, merchant ships but also sailing ships or cruise vessels. Whenever possible, data or data subsets are transmitted in real-time. Ocean surface is the location of strong exchanges with the atmosphere but also with ice and continents. Ship based underway measurements can make a significant contribution to the observation of this very active layer on condition that the datasets produced would be properly qualified and assembled.
GOSUD aims at assembling in-situ observations of the world ocean surface collected by a variety of ships and at distributing quality controlled datasets. Until December 2018, the variables considered by GOSUD were temperature and salinity. To reach this objective, GOSUD strategy is to work on the following aspects:
i) Establish direct contact with the data collectors in order to facilitate all stages of the process from data acquisition to data transmission and feedback on the data quality.
ii) Encourage standard procedures for instrument settings and maintenance, water samples analysis, real-time quality control, and delayed mode processing and provide the corresponding documentation.
iii) Ensure real-time transmission and apply automatic quality controls on the real-time dataflow.
iv)Fully document the delayed mode datasets through metadata and links to publications.
v) Facilitate data access by a large community of users by offering fully documented datasets and products.
vi) Highlight the synthetic products based on the GOSUD datasets developed by scientific organizations.
Global Ocean Surface Underway Data (GOSUD) is an initiative of the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) program. Following recommendation IODE-XVI.10 (Lisbon November 2000): “… to acquire, quality control, store in the standard format, and disseminate the collected underway sea surface salinity data …the Global Ocean Surface Underway Data (GOSUD) Project was established in 2001.