AAGRUUK: the Arctic Archive for Geophysical Research

2005 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting

PJ Johnson

Hawai'i Mapping Research Group

UH-SOEST, Honolulu, HI 96822

paul@hawaii.edu

MH Edwards

Hawai'i Mapping Research Group

DJ Wright

Dept of Geosciences, Oregon State Univ

Corvallis, OR 97331-5506

dawn@dusk.geo.orst.edu

M Dailey

Dept of Geosciences, Oregon State Univ

The key to developing and maintaining a unified community database lies in building and supporting a general organizational structure linking distributed databases through the worldwide web via a portal that contains key information, links, and search engines, is maintained and updated by people familiar with the data sets, and contains sufficient information to be useful across many disciplines encompassed by arctic scientists. There must also be enough flexibility in the approach to support two disparate types of principal investigators who wish to contribute data: those who desire or require relinquishing their data to a repository managed by others and those who wish to maintain control of their data and online archives. To provide this flexibility and accommodate the diversity, volume, and complexity of multidisciplinary geological and geophysical data for the Arctic Ocean we are developing AAGRUUK, an online data repository combined with a web-based archive-linking infrastructure to produce a distributed Data Management System.

The overarching goal of AAGRUUK is to promote collaborative research and multidisciplinary studies and foster new scientific insights for the Arctic Basin. To date the archive includes bathymetry, sidescan and subbottom data collected by the nuclear-powered submarines during the Science Ice Exercises (SCICEX), multibeam bathymetry collected by the USCGC HEALY and the Nathaniel B. Palmer, plus near-shore data around Barrow, Alaska as well as ice camp T3 and nuclear submarine soundings. Integration of the various bathymetric datasets has illustrated a number of problems, some of which aren't readily apparent until multiple overlapping datasets have been combined. Foremost among these are sounding errors caused by mapping while breaking ice and navigational misalignments in the SCICEX data. The former error is apparent in swath data that follow an irregular navigational track, indicating that a ship was unable to proceed directly from one point to another. Depths in these circuitous tracks depict a hummocky seafloor texture that is not observed in data covering the same region that were collected when there was open water. Navigation offsets in the SCICEX data are more likely to produce a checkboard pattern in the topography or even knife-edge ridges running down canyons. Despite the problems detected, the combined bathymetric database already shows strong potential for illuminating scientific investigations. For example, AAGRUUK integrated data for the Alaska margin have increased the coverage of any one individual dataset by several orders of magnitude. Analogous datasets for other arctic ridges including Gakkel Ridge, Lomonosov Ridge, Alpha-Mendeleev Ridge, the Chukchi Borderland and the Yermak Plateau are planned for release over the next two years.

0910 Data processing
3094 Instruments and techniques
4294 Instruments and techniques
Ocean Sciences [OS]
Earth and Space Informatics [IN]

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