Essential Ocean Variables

Marine monitoring efforts sample some of the same variables so commonly that they have been deemed “essential” by the research community. These essential ocean variables (EOVs) have broad utility across research questions and are prioritized variables for ingestion into CIOOS Pacific. These EOVs are also of interest to the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and CIOOS contributes to these global efforts to better understand our changing oceans. Currently, CIOOS Pacific fully supports seven EOVs and this list will expand over time to include other variables.

The metadata required by CIOOS includes essential ancillary data of time, depth, latitude, and longitude. This allows for the determination of derived or related sub-variables, including several which are related to the fundamental properties of seawater, without the need for additional measurement. These additional variables are fully supported by CIOOS Pacific.

While CIOOS Pacific has made every effort to create an easy-to-use system for data contributors, in some instances data sets may contain variables which are only partially supported. These variables cannot be searched or filtered via the Data Catalogue or the Asset Map. However, data sets containing partially supported variables are discoverable by searching “organization” or a fully-supported variable contained within the same data set. All data sets within CIOOS are accessible and may be downloaded.