Quality Control steps for EMODnet Chemistry Eutrophication aggregated datasets - v2021, [10/03/2021].

Abstract

This document describes Quality Control steps procedure adopted to obtain the 2021 release of the standardised, harmonised and validated data collections concerning eutrophication (nutrients, chlorophyll and oxygen) per sea region (Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Arctic Region, Baltic Sea, Greater North Sea and North East Atlantic Ocean). All data entering EMODnet Chemistry are managed according to standard protocols developed in the framework of the European consolidated SeaDataNet marine data infrastructure (https://www.seadatanet.org), and undergo a commonly agreed metadata and data validation process (Giorgetti et al., 2020). An automatic Robot Harvester, properly configured with predefined criteria of geographical and temporal coverage and parameters, is adopted to retrieve specific data sets from distributed data centers to obtain data collections per sea region from the heterogeneous datasets originating from multiple institutions. Two types of data are available: • vertical profiles (VP) for data that have been collected roughly at the same time and location for several consecutive vertical depths, • time series (TS) for data collected at the same location and depth but repeated in time