NANOOS - How to use this site

Welcome to the NANOOS Web Portal! Here you'll receive simplified and coordinated access to the data, products, tools, and educational materials of the Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems. Even at its inception, July 2008, you'll find a lot of information and tools already available. These are here to help those of us concerned about our oceans and estuaries better understand and manage these precious resources.

The NANOOS Portal continues to evolve as more observing sensors are deployed to key areas of the ocean environment and new data, products, tools, and educational materials are developed. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

Here's what's on the NANOOS Portal and how to find your topics of interest.

Home

Home provides a brief introduction to NANOOS and Noteworthy where featured products or announcements will rotate with new such items. These features can also be found in the appropriate menu buttons on the left column of the site or at the bottom of the page under In the News, and will also be archived in these sections. Click on the cyan titles to go directly to the data or product. You may also find cyan text within product descriptions that you may click to learn more.

About NANOOS

Here are numerous ways you can learn what NANOOS and ocean observing are all about. Click on the menu tabs across the top of the page:

Intro - Purpose, users, future expansion of NANOOS services
History - Evolution of NANOOS from 2003 to today
Members - All of the many NANOOS partners
Documents - Governing agreement, proposal, reports, presentations from 2003 to today
About the Logo - Artist and symbolic significance of the logo images
Ocean Observing - Uses for and the how-to of ocean observing
Sensor Platforms - Examples of sensor platforms used to gather data
About IOOS - National purpose and procedure for an Integrated Ocean Observing System

Data Explorer

The Data Explorer section provides access to NANOOS obervational data and model output. Data is numerical information. Observations are measurements made by instruments, such as a thermometer. Model data are the output from numerical calculations that use scientific knowledge to estimate the values of environmental quantities, such as the amount of rain in the next 24 hours or the amount of plankton in a particular area. Data explorers provide data geographically, historically, or by instrument for analysis.

The NANOOS Portal will provide access to stores of numerical information as well as visual displays of that information. The Portal may maintain its own data store or it may point to the original data provider.

NVS

The NANOOS Visualization System (NVS), your tool for easy access to data. NVS gathers data across a wide range of assets such as buoys, shore stations, and coastal land-based stations. Never before available downloads and visualizations are provided in a consistent format. You can access plots and data for almost all in-situ assets for the previous 30-day period.

Products

Products are generally web based applications and tools that allow you to visualize and / or download data and model output. Products can be filtered by region, type, variables, and keywords.

Click on the cyan titles to go directly to a product.

Services

Services are applications that provide programmatic interfaces to data and model output. Use the form to define variables and a region to view a list of services that match your search criteria.

Education

NANOOS outreach to educators and students is of critical importance to the goal of a regional and national ocean observing system: the fostering of ocean literacy or the knowledge of the ocean's influence on you and your influence on the ocean. The Ocean Literacy Campaign has put forth seven principles of ocean literacy:

Earth has one big ocean with many features
The ocean and life in the ocean shape the features of Earth
The ocean is a major influence on weather and climate
The ocean makes Earth habitable
The ocean supports a great diversity of life and ecosystems
The ocean and humans are inextricably linked
The ocean is largely unexplored

An integrated ocean observing system provides the continuous availability of data and information, which to be of value depends upon everyone understanding how to make use of what's available and why that's necessary. Everyone, all stakeholders, refers to every region and sector, that is, industry, tribal and state governments, research, and most especially education.

Educators are charged with the task of making ocean literacy happen, of conveying the complexity and importance of ocean resources. All of us must understand the necessity of managing this intricate web of waterways and the species living within and around it. We must both protect our resources for future generations and utilize them to the benefit of all.

NANOOS will build upon and strengthen those educational efforts already in place as well as create new ones. Further, NANOOS outreach in the future will also include training on the new tools, products, and applications developed for our diverse user community when those come online.

Click on the cyan Lesson Plans menu button to see what plans are available. And, please know, more are on the way.

Lesson Plans

Lesson plans are complete information and instruction for teachers to present to students on an individual lesson. Lesson plans generally include the objectives, the educational standards the instruction meets, all required materials, student activities that allow exploration and knowledge extension, evaluation, and the estimated time it takes to complete the lesson. NANOOS lesson plans aid the exploration of ocean related topics.

Click on the cyan titles to go directly to these plans.