SAMOS
SAMOS (Shipboard Automated Meteorological and Oceanographic System) is a program operated by the Florida State University Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) to receive meteorological and oceanographic data from ships at sea in near real time, to verify the quality of that data and to provide feedback on the data quality to the ship. Details and further information can be found on the SAMOS website, including what data is covered, how to go about including your ship in the program, points of contact, submission formats and much more.
This help page only touches the surface and primarily covers how SCS interacts with SAMOS. Lower level details have intentionally been left out as they are the domain of SAMOS/FSU. It is highly recommended you visit the above links to learn more.
NOAA OMAO agreed to participate in this effort beginning with the NOAA Ship HENRY BIGELOW in the fall of 2006. Other ships were added over time and currently the entire NOAA fleet should be submitting their data to FSU on a nightly basis whenever possible.
In prior versions of SCS participation in SAMOS required a lot of user involvement. An event logger was required to be run for every cruise along with another 'mailer' application. However, in the current version of SCS, this workload has been reduced and an effort was made to make the SAMOS process as integrated, seamless and automatic as possible. That being said, a lot of user involvement is still required in terms of keeping meta-data up to date.
Meta Data Management
SAMOS metadata is managed inside the CFE page of SCS. Whenever a publish operation occurs all data fields of interest to SAMOS will automatically have calculated/derived feeds generated for them computing a 1 minute average. You do not have to create or manage any SAMOS definitions in this version of SCS. That being said, it is not recommended to edit the SAMOS sensor definitions either as when a publish operation occurs all existing SAMOS sensors are wiped clean and rebuilt from scratch (any changes you manually make to SAMOS interfaces, messages or datafields will be lost and reset on publish).
However, the meta data you enter with regards to the physical devices, vessel information and so forth DO change and are critical to the success of SAMOS evaluations. Please be sure to keep your physical inventory up to date and be sure to install / link all your logical interfaces to their appropriate physical devices so SAMOS is cognizant of what physical sensor is providing a given data stream in case manufacturing flaws or other useful information can be gleaned. While always important, for some devices this meta data is critical (calibration dates/files, etc) when it comes time to evaluate the produced streams for QA/QC.
Do not manually modify any SAMOS interfaces, message definitions or data fields in CFE.
Submission Management
Submissions to SAMOS are reviewed and controlled via the SAMOS page under the Data Management menu item.
At the top of the page you will see a checkbox followed by a few buttons. The checkbox tells SCS to automatically extract, package and send your data to SAMOS every night. If this box is unchecked then no data will be sent to SAMOS unless you manually send it.
Manual submission of data is done via the buttons following the checkbox. You can submit sensor data (daily increments, hold control or shift to select multiple days or a range of days to send), current meta data regarding your vessel itself or current meta data covering your instrument suite as defined in CFE.
Below the submission buttons you will find a grid showing your submission history. You should review this to determine the quality of your data and to find gaps in your submissions. Each submitted day will be color coded to show you the overall QA/QC rating for the day.
If your ship is part of the NOAA fleet then more information can be found on the SDAT site - https://sdat.noaa.gov/DataManagement/DataQuality including what sensor is being flagged as problematic. This will enable you to resolve any issues SAMOS finds as early as possible rather then collecting bad data for the entire cruise before finding out there was a problem. Details regarding your daily submissions and their QA/QC results can also be found on the SAMOS website itself. Your results will be available via the SAMOS site whether you are a NOAA ship or not.
