The Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) is a focused field experiment in the Indian Ocean with international participation from Europe, India, United States, and Asia. The three month Intensive Field Phase (IFP) is scheduled from 1 January through March 1999 with research aircraft flights and ship cruises conducted during various times within the IFP. The Operations Center will be located in Male, Maldive Islands. Supplemental collaborating field activity aircraft flights may take place from the Seychelle Islands.
The first objective will contribute to a better understanding of the decadal and longer time scale forcing; the second will lead to improved coupled ocean-atmosphere models; and the third will aid in the development of tropospheric chemistry models. The equatorial Indian Ocean during the northeast monsoon season is a unique natural laboratory for addressing these objectives. The selected experiment area is probably the only place in the world where an intense source of continental aerosols, anthropogenic trace species and their reaction products (e.g. sulfates and ozone) from the northern hemisphere is directly connected to the pristine air of the southern hemisphere by a cross equatorial monsoonal flow into the ITCZ. Furthermore, the deep convection within the ITCZ gives rise to extensive mid- and upper-level cloud systems.
More information on the INDOEX Project can be found at the World Wide Web (WWW) "Home Page" for INDOEX (http://www-indoex.ucsd.edu/).
The development and maintenance of a comprehensive and accurate data archive is a critical step in meeting the scientific objectives of INDOEX. The overall guiding philosophy for the INDOEX data management is to make the completed data set available to the world scientific community as soon as possible following the IFP in order to better incorporate chemistry and aerosol data and results into global climate models.
The INDOEX data will be available to the scientific community through a number of designated INDOEX Data Archive and Analysis Centers. Data Archive Centers, containing the final archive data in native formats will, be established at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Joint Office for Science Support (JOSS), Boulder Colorado, USA [for U.S. data sets], the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), New Delhi, India [for Indian data sets], and at the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique du CNRS (LMD) located in Paris, France [for European data sets]. Data Analysis Centers will be established at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO), Center for Climate, Clouds, and Chemistry (C4), La Jolla, California, and at the NPL, New Delhi, India. Additional Data Analysis Centers may be established as needed. One method of data exchange between Data Analysis Centers and other users includes the use of the C4 Integrated Data System (CIDS). The CIDS was designed to facilitate multi-disciplinary research by providing a common interface to complex and heterogeneous data sets. CIDS software and format converters are planned to be installed at the various Data Analysis Centers and could facilitate data and derived product exchange using a common data format (NetCDF).
Oversight of the INDOEX data management tasks will come from the INDOEX Project Office in collaboration with the INDOEX International Steering Committee, as well as coordination with individual investigators and other participating groups/agencies. This INDOEX Data Management Plan describes the guiding data management policies (section 2), the strategy and functional description of the data management systems (section 3), and the implementation details of the INDOEX data sets and the data management systems (section 4). Detailed information regarding the INDOEX Research and Operational data sets are provided in Appendix A and B, respectively.
The INDOEX data management archive activities are being coordinated by the UCAR/JOSS, SIO/C4, NPL, and LMD. These activities fall into two major areas: (1) development and implementation of a real-time field data catalog to provide in-field support and project summaries/updates for the Principal Investigators (PIs) and insure optimum data collection; and (2) establishment of a coordinated final archive/analysis system and providing data distribution/support for the PIs and the world scientific community. General guidance has been provided by the INDOEX International Steering Committee (see Section 2). The JOSS has primary responsibility for the in-field collection, compilation and access to all supporting operational data (see Section 4) for the INDOEX IFP. The JOSS may also quality control and reformat select operational data (e.g. soundings) prior to access by the community (see Section 3). The JOSS, NPL, and LMD will jointly be responsible for coordinating and archiving other research data that were collected, processed and quality controlled by the INDOEX PIs (see Section 4). The Data Analysis Centers will be responsible for generating combined data sets or providing access to separate data sets, as necessary (see Section 3.5). The JOSS will be the location of the final Archive location for U.S. data sets; NPL for Indian data sets, and LMD for European data sets (see Sections 3.1 and 3.6).