GulfHub: Leveraging industry-academic partnerships to expand physical oceanographic data availability in the Gulf of Mexico

The Gulf of Mexico offshore energy industry has collected an immense amount of physical oceanographic data over the last three decades. The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System Regional Association (GCOOS-RA), in collaboration with Texas A & M University in College Station and Corpus Christi, RPS Group, CLS Woods Hole Group, Fugro, and Ocean Sierra LLC, has gained access to many of these data from individual companies and also from Joint Industry Projects (JIPs). The acquired datasets have been fully quality controlled to U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) standards and metadata appropriately supplemented. The datasets are available online through the GCOOS GulfHub data portal for us by anyone. In this paper, the overall project, system architecture and disaster recovery plan are described and an introduction to the available datasets, previously privately held, is provided. At the time of writing, more than 4600 unique physical oceanographic datasets are available on the GulfHub ERDDAP server. Of these, more than 2900 were previously industry proprietary datasets from deepwater moorings, offshore oil rigs and platforms, and vessels. It is anticipated that more than 5000 datasets will be available upon completion of the project, including data collected in the Understanding the Gulf Ocean Systems (UGOS) initiative of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The paper includes summaries of the extent and content of the various datasets. The research reported in this paper was supported by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under award number 2000009971.