AOV was born from a recognition that various Arctic Observing networks needed a tool – beyond project tracking systems and data catalogs – to strategically assess status and progress for long-term monitoring programs.  A new, intermediate level of “granularity” (between project-level information and dataset-level information) was needed in a portal that focused on locations, activities, and resources.  These are encapsulated in this mapping application as “observing sites.”  AOV is evolving and growing, founded on the principle that collaborative information sharing can provide a comprehensive – and therefore useful – perspective.

Vision

Arctic Observing – spread as it is among various national and international initiatives – could benefit from an improved cyber-infrastructure that facilitates further integration, discovery, and analysis between funding bodies, PIs, data centers, users, etc.  One piece of that vision is to have an observing activity for the observing program – beyond individual projects, datasets, and individual agency or initiative efforts – to enable strategic assessment. 

Scope

Funded initially by the U.S. NSF Arctic Sciences Section, the viewer is becoming broadly interagency for U.S. efforts.  Information exchange with international entities is welcomed. The viewer is circumpolar, and includes sites for marine, terrestrial, and atmospheric observing activities.  AOV is primarily for policy makers, program managers, science planners, logistics planners, and data management specialists.  It also may be of interest to researchers, students, the media, and the public.

For the programmatic and strategic assessment of Arctic Observing efforts, an intermediate level resource is needed.  This should not be a data portal, because details such as sensor names, serial numbers, etc. – and the datasets themselves – are more appropriately maintained at the data archives.  And it should not be a project tracking system, which would lack the “spatial granularity” needed for tracking specific data collection activities.  

Rather, this resource should focus on observing sites, with a bare minimum of metadata fields for ease, comprehensiveness, timeliness, and interoperability.  Agencies and organizations tied to Arctic Observing can take advantage of the new application, and can use the collaborative and distributed web services as a tool for their own purposes, to systematically and comprehensively assess progress, to optimize sampling designs, and to know where to invest in new deployments.

Observing Sites in AOV

AOV encompasses active or previously deployed cruise tracks, moorings, buoys, towers, boreholes, sampling sites, sensor locations, climate and weather stations, shoreline surveys, repeat vegetation plots, stream gauges, etc.: wherever repeat Arctic Observing data have been collected.

The viewer currently contains thousands of instrumentation and observing sites, including:

  • 10,800+ sites funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the Arctic Observation Network (AON)

  • 5,581 sites from the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX)

  • 1,907 boreholes associated with the international Thermal State of Permafrost (TSP) project

  • 1,067 vegetation plots recovered as part of the NSF-funded Back to the Future (BTF) project to recover and resample old sites dating back to 1964

  • 715 meteorological towers from FluxNet: A Global Network

  • 410 permafrost sites from the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) program

  • 344 geophysical sites from EarthScope

  • 251 locations for mass balance measurements and ice cores from the Seasonal Ice Zone Observing Network (SIZONET)

  • 239 sites associated with the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna’s (CAFF) Arctic Terrestrial Biodiversity Monitoring Program

  • 104 monitoring locations associated with the Circum-Arctic Lakes Observation Network (CALON)

  • 54 measurement sites from SnowNet

  • 39 USGS Permafrost and Climate Monitoring Network sites on Alaska’s North Slope

  • and more, including Arctic-GRO, GLISN, GNET, ICECAPS, and OASIS.

The viewer also displays information for scientific cruises and drifting buoys:

  • Nearly 500 sampling sites from NOAA’s Russian-American Long-term Census of the Arctic (RUSALCA), contributed by AOOS.

  • 234 drifting buoys from the International Arctic Buoy Programme (IABP)

  • 132 ship tracks dating from 2007 for the Healy, Knorr, Louis S. St-Laurent, Marcus G. Langseth, Thomas G. Thompson, and other research vessels

  • 37 buoy tracks for the NPS Autonomous Ocean Flux Buoy program

For each site or track, details include:

  • Project title, funding agency, award number, and contact information

  • Discipline, type of measurement, GCMD keywords, location, start and end dates

  • Links to more information, whether data are archived, and links to datasets and websites

And last, but not least, AOV includes major Arctic research facilities:

  • 44 field stations from the International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic (INTERACT)

  • 40 observatories and facilities from the the International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere (IASOA) initiative

Credits

AOV is founded on collaborative efforts among many groups that support information exchange and interoperability.

The AOV database and web map viewer are development efforts shared among: Craig Tweedie, a postdoc, and students at the Systems Ecology Lab at the University of Texas at El Paso; Allison Gaylord with Nuna Technologies; William Manley with the INSTAAR QGIS Laboratory; and Naomi Whitty with CH2M HILL Polar Services. AOV provides a real-world test bed for student-driven cyberinfrastructure activities -- ranging from systems architecture and programming to application design.  

Photos for the banner images are courtesy of Sarah Das (WHOI), Faustine Bernadac (Polar Field Services), Bill Schmoker (PolarTREC 2010; ARCUS), Roy Stehle (SRI), Doug Kane (INE, WERC, UAF), and Chris Larsen (UAF GI).  Thank you.  The icons on the Home page are courtesy of http://www.entypo.com.  

This website is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Contract No. NSFDACS11C1675. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Citation

Please cite as:

Manley, W.F., Gaylord, A.G., Kassin, A., Cody, R., Vargas, S.A., Barba, M., Dover, M., Escarzaga, S., Habermann, T., Tweedie, C.E., Villarreal, S., and Whitty, N., 2018, Arctic Observing Viewer (AOV): Englewood, Colorado USA, CH2M HILL Polar Services. Digital Media.  http://arcticobservingviewer.org.

See Also

Milestones

06/2020 - The ARMAP/AOV Team is helping to start up a new collaborative effort, the Polar Observing Assets Working Group (POAwg), under the SAON Committee on Observations and Networks (CON). Bill Manley will be a co-chair, along with Roberta Pirazzini from INTAROS. A core group is currently scoping goals and tasks, and it is expected that the first full meeting will be in September. To learn more, see the POAwg poster presented at AOS 2020 as well as a related white paper.

05/2020 - The AOV 3D Viewer has been formally launched with refinements such as: custom navigation, multiple high-res. basemaps, and advanced visualization as well as improvements to Help, the Time Slider, and more. This is a massive step forward for the user experience. Please take a look (by clicking on “Launch Viewer” from the Home page) and let us know what you think.

05/2020 - The team assisted with a session at the EGU General Assembly 2020. Bill Manley was a co-convener of "Arctic Observations: Data Collection, Management, and User Engagement".

05/2020 - ARMAP and AOV brought back an ISO metadata specialist for 2020. Ted Habermann, with Metadata Game Changers, will bring valuable expertise to again help the team better implement interoperability through use of the ISO 19115 standard for research projects and observing sites.

04/2020 - The AOV database continues to grow; the Viewer now has over 35,000 observing sites across 37 networks. Recently added through established endpoints are stations from NOAA’s National Weather Service, Alaska Aviation Weather Unit, as well as hundreds of USDA SNOTEL stations across Alaska and Canada.

04/2020 - The ARMAP/AOV Team is working on streamlining and improving the backend databases and workflows. Improvements might not be obvious in the frontend Viewers but will reduce ongoing efforts, increase performance, and enable new functionalities.

03/2020 - The ARMAP/AOV Team presented and participated in the Arctic Observing Summit 2020, with a poster on the apps -- as well as a poster and white paper on a new collaborative effort.

03/2020 - The team attended the virtual ESRI Developer Summit, extending skillsets for our graduate student developers.

02/2020 - The team continues to participate in various planning and coordination efforts, including the IARPC Arctic Observing and Arctic Data Subteams, the IASC/SAON Arctic Data Committee, and federated search & semantics working groups.

01/2020 - A new, prototype 3D Viewer is under development for AOV. Get a glimpse of substantial improvements to come in a sneak peak screenshot.

12/2019 - The ARMAP/AOV Team presented a poster at the 2019 Fall AGU meeting.

11/2019 - The ARMAP/AOV Team presented at the Third Polar Data Forum and participated in hackathons for semantics and federated search.

11/2019 - The team has recommended formation of an "Interoperable Network Description Working Group", as described in our white paper for the upcoming Arctic Observing Summit 2020, entitled "Optimizing Arctic Observing Through Interoperable Information Sharing Across Networks". This new working group might be established under an international coordinating body, the Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks (SAON) initiative. Please let us know if you have any feedback on this as it moves forward in the near future.

10/2019 - The ARMAP/AOV Team is exploring options for displaying near real-time ship tracks and positions in the Viewers, through subscriptions for AIS feeds with some additional coding. A particular focus for the near future is to display information for the Polarstern, which is currently locked in Arctic sea ice as part of the MOSAiC expedition.

09/2019 - The ARMAP/AOV Team gave a presentation to numerous NSF Program Officers.

09/2019 - The AOV Team is furthering collaboration with the International Arctic Buoy Programme (IABP).

09/2019 - The ARMAP/AOV Team presented at the Arctic Futures 2050 Conference.

08/2019 - Over 6000 sites have been added to the AOV Viewer across multiple networks, including more from NEON and NASA ABoVE, as well as buoys from the O-buoy project, CRREL-DMBBP, and WHOI. The AOV Viewer now has over 32,000 observing sites – doubled over the last year!

07/2019 - Based on user feedback, we have added a map layer for 24 stations from the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC), helping broaden AOV with inclusion of this important global initiative.

06/2019 - The team has continued collaboration with the Arctic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (ArcticLCC), this time specifically to pull observing sites from a JSON feed from the Umiq database for inclusion in AOV.