Steps to Submit Ocean Carbon and Acidification Data to NCEI

1. Prepare your metadata

   If you are submitting ocean carbon data, please download the ocean carbon data submission form and fill out your metadata information into the spreadsheet (Column C). For all other types of OA data (including biological OA data), please download the ocean acidification data submission form instead. Here is a filled out submission form with example contents, in case you find it useful. The submission form can be applied to most types of ocean acidification data including chemical, experimental, and model output data.

   If you need help with a specific metadata element, please refer to the Instructions file. You can use the help reference numbers in Column D of the submission form as a key to find their definitions in the Instructions file. For a list of NCEI platform (ship) codes, please click here. The NCEI ship codes are synced with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) ship codes in most cases.

   Alternatively, you could fill out the XML template file (not recommended). Once downloaded, please change the file extension from ".txt" to ".xml". We recommend to use notepad++, or an xml editor to fill out your information. Please do not use rich format editor, such as Microsoft Word.

2. Prepare your data files

   No specific file format is required. We recommend using ASCII character encoding (e.g., comma-separated values (CSV), Excel, etc.) or NetCDF file format. Please avoid the use of commercial proprietary data file formats.

   For in situ observational water chemistry data, please follow the below data templates as much as you can (If there is no data in one column, please remove the column entirely, feel free to add additional columns as awell):
   • Underway data: Column header names description (data file (csv) example)
   • Profile data (e.g., CTD, discrete bottle water samples, etc): Column header names description (data file (csv) example)
   • Mooring data (e.g., buoys): Column header names description (data file (csv) example)

   Please refer to the OCADS resources page for the recommended QC flags and additional information about your data submission.

   
   

3. When ready, send your metadata and data files to NCEI

   Please send both the metadata and data files to NODC.DataOfficer (at) noaa.gov, and CC NOAA.OCADS (at) noaa.gov. Please indicate that this is an Ocean Acidification data set in the email. If you are submitting multiple data sets, please send out one email for each submission, and be sure to use different email subject lines.