Global Temperature-Salinity Profile Program - International Contributors

International Contributors

Several countries contribute to the GTSPP. They are:

• Australia
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Japan
• Russia
• United States

Canada's Marine Environmental Data Service (MEDS) leads the project, and has the operational responsibility to gather and process the real-time data. MEDS accumulates real-time data from several sources via the GTS. They check the data for several types of errors, and remove duplicate copies of the same observation before passing the data on to NODC. The quality control procedures used in GTSPP were developed by MEDS, who also coordinated the publication of those procedures through the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC).

The U.S. National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) performs four functions for the GTSPP:

1. Maintains the global database of temperature and salinity data and provides online access to the data.
2. Adds realtime data supplied by MEDS to the database.
3. Processes delayed mode copies of data by performing the same data quality tests as MEDS, then adds data to the database.
4. Prepares monthly data sets and transfers them by network to participants in the U.S., Australia and France, as well as to requestors.

In addition to MEDS and NODC, three science centers participate in the project by independently evaluating the delayed-mode data sets for the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans. Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), and NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) perform this function as Data Assembly Centers for the World Ocean Circulation Program, which the GTSPP supports.