IGMETS Data Policy 

Officially, IGMETS participants are strongly encouraged to follow the IOC-UNESCO Guidelines for a Data Management Plan, which includes (1) ensuring the safety and future legacy of your data through proper documentation and long-term archiving at a recognized IODE Data Center, and (2) making your data publicly available to the scientific community to facilitate better science and discovery now and in the future.

Unofficially, IGMETS realizes that different countries/institutes/programs/researchers/funding-situations have equally different requirements and data-policies, and that forcing a blanket policy upon all participants would greatly reduce the number of participants, especially those in some of the most data sparse regions.  In the interests of being as inclusive as possible in our data policy, and thus having as many participants as possible, we have adopted the following IGMETS data policy:

(*)  Unless you instruct us otherwise, any time series data submitted to IGMETS will not be shared, distributed, or made publicly available.  The data will only be used for creation of the standard visualization figures and analyses used in the IGMETS report and in the IGMETS metabase.

(*)  The IGMETS web site and/or IGMETS metabase do not serve or provide any actual data.  These web pages show standard figures and provide contact information (e.g., who to contact about the data or program).  Any party or person requesting data directly from IGMETS itself will be forwarded to the original data provider.

(*)  The IGMETS time series data are stored on a secure computer within an institutional firewall.  The data are not stored on this public IGMETS web site.

(*) The IGMETS time series data will only be handled by our data liaison, Todd O'Brien, who has successfully and discretely provided secure data handling for ICES and SCOR time series working groups since 2004.

(*)  IGMETS participants will not by default have direct access to anyone else's data.  (Your participation in IGMETS does not give you access to other's data.  Others will also not have access to your data.)   Instead, processed-derivatives and aggregates are created and provided for the sub-analyses (e.g., monthly average chlorophyll trends from 1998-2012)

If you still have questions, email us at [ This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ].