The Global Ocean Surface Underway Data (GOSUD) Project is an Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) programme designed as an end to end system for data collected by ships as they traverse their ocean tracks. The goal of the GOSUD Project is to develop and implement the data system for ocean surface data, to acquire and manage these data and to provide a mechanism to integrate these data with other types of data collected in the world oceans. For the purposes of this Project, the data concerned are those collected as a platform is underway from the ocean surface down to the mixed layer base. GOSUD aims at assembling in-situ observations of the world ocean surface collected by a variety of ships and at distributing quality controlled datasets. At present time the variables considered by GOSUD are temperature and salinity. To reach this objective, GOSUD strategy is to work on the following aspects: (1) Establish direct contact with the data collectors in order to facilitate all stages of the process from data acquisition to data transmission and feed back on the data quality; (2) Encourage standard procedures for instrument settings and maintenance, water samples analysis, real time quality control and delayed mode processing and provide the corresponding documentations; (3) Ensure real time transmission and apply automatic quality controls on the real time dataflow; (4) Fully document the delayed mode datasets through meta data and links to publications; (5) Facilitate the data access by a large community of users by offering fully documented datasets and products; (6) Highlight the synthetic products based on the GOSUD datasets developed by scientific organisations.
