An oceanographic and meteorological metadatabase for the southern Gulf of Mexico

摘要

GolMexSur, a metadatabase for the oceanographic and meteorological information of the southern Gulf of Mexico (SGM) (17N 85W - 26N 99W) was designed and implemeted in order to organize and manage in a fine and regular mesh, oceanic and meteorological data coming from several heterogeneous gross-grid-sized or sparse data sources. The metadatabase has three organizational components: (1) knowledge base, (2) metadata, and (3) data values. Knowledge base component contains three classes of knowledge: operating knowledge (triggers, processes, and integrity constraints), control knowledge for sequential systems interactions, and decision knowledge for parallel systems interactions. metadata component contains organizational information related to the environmental and hydrological data: data's spatial and temporal location, measurement units, obtaining method, quality, etc. Finally, data values component represents the numerical value of each variable or parameter (sea surface temperature, wind speed, wind direction, sea level pressure, etc). Additionally, metadata and data values components have two temporal scopes: recent information, and historical information. GolmexSur has information from sources such as coastal airports, coastal meteorological stations, oceanographic cruises, buoys, wave gauges, and information derived or estimated from satellite imageries or numerical models. In a first stage, GolMexSur was designed and implemented using MS Visual FoxPro~( direct a ), but recently the design was modified to work with Oracle~( direct a ). The implementation of this metadatabase represents the first step of a major project, whose main objective is to build a regional operational oceanographic system for the SGM, and at present it is being used in studying the oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the SGM oil region.