Four IMPORTANT announcements linked to IDP2017

Dear colleagues,

We have four important announcements linked to the recently released Intermediate Data Product (IDP) 2017, some of which may affect your data, so please read carefully:

1. During the preparation of IDP2017 the names of GEOTRACES parameters and cruises were formalised. These are available at the following link: http://www.geotraces.org/dp/dp-conventions.  We ask for investigators to use these conventions during the future submission of data and intercalibration reports where possible to facilitate activities associated with the management of GEOTRACES data.

2. GEOTRACES has decided to release an update to its recent 2017 Intermediate Data Product in conjunction with a Townhall on Wednesday the 14 February 2018 at the 2018 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland (USA). This version of the IDP2017 v2 will be focused on including data approved by the standards and intercalibration committee but not processed in time for inclusion in the IDP2017 v1.

3. The release of IDP2017 v2 provides an opportunity to fix any errors/omissions in the v1 of IDP2017. To facilitate this, we ask all investigators to examine the IDP2017 v1 and report any errors or omissions to reiner.schlitzer@awi.de  and geotraces.dac@bodc.ac.uk  by the 15th of December 2017. We draw attention to the fact that users should focus on the actual IDP2017 digital datasets (available at: http://www.bodc.ac.uk/geotraces/data/idp2017) or the webODV extractor (available at: https://webodv.awi.de/geotraces), rather than the web-based egeotraces.org site, which only presents a subset of the IDP2017 data.

4. There may be errors in IDP2017 associated with the data quality flags that we would like you to check in your data. Data sets that were processed at GDAC “mapped” the flag schemes you might have used to the IODE flag scheme that is used in IDP2017:

1 Good:  Passed documented required QC tests

2 Not evaluated, not available or unknown: Used for data when no QC test performed or the information on quality is not available

3 Questionable/suspect: Failed non-critical documented metric or subjective test(s)

4 Bad: Failed critical documented QC test(s) or as assigned by the data provider

9 Missing data: Used as place holder when data are missing

Since your IDP2017 data passed the S&I review, it should have flag 1, unless you specified a flag that would correspond with flag 2, 3, 4, or 9. Because the IODE scheme does not have a flag for “Below Detection Limit” (BDL), data that were reported as BDL were mapped in IDP2017 to appear as zero values with flag 2. Please check that any data you reported as BDL shows in IDP2017 as zero values with flag 2. Please also check all other flags in your data to make sure they were mapped as closely as possible to the IODE flag scheme.

Thank you for your support of the GEOTRACES program,

Andrew Bowie, William Landing and Alessandro Tagliabue
Co-chairs, GEOTRACES Data Management Committee