Linking multi-disciplinary data with webODV

webODV is the online version of the popular Ocean Data View (ODV) desktop software for analysis and visualization of marine and other environmental data used by more than 10,000 researchers worldwide. Like ODV, webODV provides an interactive graphical user interface and offers rich feature sets via context specific menus. While desktop ODV requires all datasets to reside on the end user machine, webODV works differently. All datasets as well as a special version of the ODV software reside and run on dedicated webODV servers. Users do not have to install any software or download the sometimes-bulky datasets. Instead, users simply connect to datasets using their web-browser. New browser tabs open for every opened dataset, each tab providing an “ODV-like” interactive user interface. Previous ODV users will find it very easy to work with webODV. Concise getting-started documents help guide new users.

Large volumes of important environmental datasets for all parts of the Earth System are accessible from webODV servers at https://explore.webodv.awi.de/ and https://webodv-egi-ace.cloud.ba.infn.it. This includes global TS- and BGC-Argo profile data, GLODAP carbon system data, SOCAT surface fCO₂ data, MEOP marine mammals data, and the World Ocean Atlas 2023. In addition, we also provide global collections of historical meteorological as well as river-runoff data.

In this presentation we focus on new developments that greatly facilitate connecting these diverse, multidisciplinary datasets, linking, for instance, ocean interior data with satellite observations, numerical model output as well as with meteorological and river-runoff data. A number of use cases will be shown, including (1) using trusted reference data for quality control of new BGC-Argo float data, (2) calculating and displaying the difference between ocean section repeats, and (3) the analysis and display of model/data differences.