In the initial phase of the national North Sea Research Programme, Projet Mer-Projekt Zee (1970-1976), over 200 researchers gathered data from various disciplines for the development of a coastal sea management model. The second phase, the Concerted Research Actions (1977-1982), resulted in a deeper insight into some specific aspects of this coastal and estuarine ecosystem.

Until recently, the data obtained during these first phases was only available in paper formats. After two years of data collection and, most importantly, of data documentation this valuable information is now digitized and is being published through the BMDC portal.

The Management Unit of the North Sea Mathematical Models, Department of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences is recruiting for its marine data centre

who will be in charge of:

• developing web applications for publishing and visualizing data stored in a Oracle data base,
• developing software used onboard research vessels for storing and reporting data

Technical skills:

• experience with the development of web applications (html, css, php, Javascript, Ajax, ...)
• basic knowledge of SQL
• knowledge of Visual Basic and of object–oriented programming

Assets:

• Experience with “web services”
• Experience with Oracle data bases and Oracle development tools
• Knowledge of common spoken Dutch or French

Requested degree: bachelor degree or equivalent, preferably in computer sciences.

More information can be requested by sending a mail to jobs@mumm.ac.be. Applications, including a curriculum vitae, can be submitted before October 31st per e–mail to the same address or by postal mail to: MUMM, Att'n Mr Serge Scory, Gulledelle 100, B–1200 Brussels.

On July 12th, Ruth Lagring joined the BMDC team.

Ruth got her Master in Biology at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in 2008. Her thesis work was devoted to the monitoring of Wetlands along the Western-Greek bird migration route.

She then joined the aerial survey programme run by MUMM. As operator on board the aircraft she spent hours, during the day, during the night, observing the sea from above, looking for pollutions and natural phenomena (like massive algal blooms).

Working with the BMDC is of course a new challenge for her. Like the other members of the team she will have to build a strong multi-disciplinary knowledge of the oceanographic processes and of the data that are collected by the scientist studying them.

No doubts she has the necessary skills to be soon fully "operational"!

Welcome Ruth!

Since May 1st, 2010, the Belgian Marine Data Centre feeds the GOSUD system again with the underway data registered on board the R/V Belgica.

The main objective of GOSUD (Global Ocean Surface Underway Data Pilot Project) is to collect, process, archive and disseminate in real time and delayed mode, sea surface salinity and other variables collected underway, by research and opportunity ships. It was founded in 2001 under the umbrella of the IOC and of JCOMM, in order to address concerns expressed by the Ocean Observations Panel for Climate in the context of climate change detection.

Once daily and at the end of each cruise, the BMDC forwards a selection of ODAS data, sampled every ten minutes to the Global Data Assembly Center run by Ifremer. For the moment, only temperature and salinity data are processed but other parameters might be included.

The third GOSUD workshop will take place on May 4-5, 2010, at the IODE Project office (Ostend, Belgium).

During IMDIS 2010 (Paris, 29-31 March 2010), Karien De Cauwer presented a new product recently released in its beta-version by the BMDC: the "Biobank". You can watch her talk (12 min.) at http://www.vimeo.com/10558168

"Biobank: An integrated system to collect and publish marine mammals information: in situ observations, necropsy results, tissue samples available for further research." De Winter J., De Cauwer K., Haelters J., Jacques Th., Jauniaux Th. and Scory S.

During this conference, members of the BMDC team also presented a poster:

"Rescuing historical marine data and making them accessible: the case of data collected during the first years of modern oceanography in Belgium." Borremans C., Scory S., De Cauwer K., Devolder M.

and made a short presentation based on an electronic poster:

"Salinity and temperature climatologies of the North Sea using the Variational Inverse Method." Scory S., Troupin Ch., Ouberdous M., Beckers J.-M.

More information on the website of the Conference.

The IDOD follow-up Committee will meet again on Monday, February 22^nd, 2010.

The main Terms of Reference of this committee are:

1. to advice on the evolution of the IDOD information system,
2. to suggest ways of improving the valorization of the system and of its content and,
3. especially for the foreign experts, to compare the achievements and the perspectives to the international standards and to the practices developed in other marine data centers of the same kind.

It is made of the Programme manager (Belspo), the various "marine" SSD promotors, a representative of the “Scar-Marbin” network, a representative of the Biodiversity platform and two foreign advisors.

Dr. Lesley Rickards, Head of the British Oceanographic Data Centre, and Mr. Neil Holdsworth, Head of the ICES data centre, accepted to act as external auditors for the actions undertaken by the BMDC in the frame of the SSD programme.

The whole disk system of our data base server will be replaced on Tuesday, December 1^st.

Update: the recovery process takes longer than foreseen. We hope the system will be up again in the evening of Friday 4^th. If you urgently need to download data, do not hesitate to contact the BMDC.

The BMDC participated in the 4^th DIVA workshop, organized by the University of Liège at its scientific premises in Calvi, Corsica (F).

DIVA is a visualisation software based on a Variational Inverse Method that allows to objectively approximate dense datasets in order to produce, for instance, climatologies.

Within SeaDatanet, the BMDC is in charge of producing climatologies for the North Sea. So far developments concentrated on CTD profiles and the production of salinity and temperature fields.

Figure: Analyzed temperature (left) and salinity (right) fields at -30 m in February, computed from a dataset covering the years 1975 to 2005.