International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS)

Project Status

As the result of a US project starting in 1981, available global surface marine data from the late 18th century to date have been assembled, quality controlled, and made widely available to the international research community in products of the Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS). A new name, International COADS (ICOADS), was agreed in 2002 to recognize the multinational input to the blended observational database and other benefits gained from extensive international collaboration, while maintaining continuity of identity with COADS, which has been widely used and referenced.

The original COADS project, and the continuing US contribution toward the new international database, ICOADS, is the result of a cooperative project between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)--specifically its Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL), its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES, conducted jointly with the University of Colorado)--and the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The NOAA portion of ICOADS is partially funded by the NOAA Climate Program Office (CPO).

ICOADS data are made available in two primary forms:

Observations: Surface marine reports from ships, buoys, and other platform types. Each report contains individual observations of meteorological and oceanographic variables, such as sea surface and air temperatures, wind, pressure, humidity, and cloudiness.
Monthly summary statistics: Ten statistics (such as the mean and median) are calculated for each of 22 observed and derived variables, using 2° latitude x 2° longitude boxes back to 1800 (and 1°x1° boxes since 1960).

Currently (Release 2.4), the observations are available for 1784-May 2007 (238 million individual marine reports), 2° monthly summaries for 1800-May 2007, and 1° summaries for 1960-May 2007. These data and summary products are drawn from two separate archives:

The most complete and highly processed observations are from the delayed-mode (ICOADS.DM) archive, covering 1784-2004 (Overview). (Note that data from 1784 through the early 1800s are extremely sparse--based on scattered ship voyages.)
Less fully processed observations, limited to Global Telecommunications System (GTS) data, are from the real-time (ICOADS.RT) archive, covering March 1997-May 2007 (Overview).

The observations and monthly summary products currently offered to users are all from ICOADS.DM through the end of 2004, and subsequently from the ICOADS.RT archive.

Update plans are as follows:

As resources permit, both archives will be extended, ICOADS.DM will be enriched with newly available or improved data, and periodically be used to replace ICOADS.RT data.
Release (currently 2.4) numbering will refer to the total (ICOADS.DM, extended as applicable by ICOADS.RT) data and products available to users at a given time.
We are also making available in ICOADS formats some important new observational sources, which in most cases represent unique new data, as "auxiliary" data sets (Access webpage).
In the future we hope to update ICOADS.RT closer to near-real-time. Meanwhile, for users requiring more recent data, we also have available NCEP Real-time observations (abbreviated in an ascii format) and ICOADS-like 2° summaries (two statistics for ten variables, utilizing a somewhat different quality control and data mixture than ICOADS).

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Updated: Aug 28, 2007 10:21:59 MDT
http://icoads.noaa.gov/status.html