The Ocean Appliance: Complete Platform Provisioning for Low-Cost Data Sharing

We report on our progress towards an Ocean Appliance - envisioned as a complete, pre-built "server-in-a-box" equipped with an ocean observation database, a forecast engine, a web server publishing an extensible web interface, a suite of web services establishing interoperability, and a library of data ingest and processing functions. Collectively, these services allow efficient ingest, organization, analysis, and distribution of observations and model results with minimal onsite configuration. By packaging the hardware as well as the software, the effort required to install and adapt the tools to the environment of the local data provider is minimized, streamlining the adoption of interoperability standards and simplifying environmental data management. We report results from a pilot project using the appliance to support cruise operations and describe preparations for an upcoming multi-ship experiment involving real-time telemetry and coordinated, simultaneous analysis of forecasts and observations.