Using GIS for Data Integration and Visualization of a Deepwater Ocean Observatory

Six years of annual visits to the New Millennium Observatory (NeMO) at Axial Volcano have provided the interdisciplinary science team with a large amount of data to manage. Each year a cruise report is compiled including dive logs and maps, sample and experiment information, and discipline summaries. All the cruise-related data is input into ArcGIS. During the five previous field seasons of the NeMO project (summer 1998–2003), this GIS database has been available at sea for use by the scientific party with ArcView. The added capability of real-time tracking of the remotely operated vehicle with the GIS database using ArcView Tracking Analyst has also been useful. When all the data for the year has been processed (navigation, sample tables) it is brought into several programs for geographical referencing and analysis. Maps can be created using a variety of programs, including ArcGIS, which provides a way to geographically display several types of data at the same time in a legible format. The GIS user can query the database several ways including by samples collected at a site for all years or all instruments deployed and recovered at a site on a particular year.