The IDEA for CARINA came up at a workshop on "CO2 in the northern North Atlantic", that was held in June 1999 in Delmenhorst, Germany.

background:

The North Atlantic has been quite well studied over the years and has benefited from the collection of quite a large amount of data. However these data have been collected by numerous different groups from many countries under the auspices of numerous different programs. Therefore there is nowhere available a complete compilation of all the data. Much of the data still resided in private hands and have not been deposited to data centers. Further there has been no systematic documentation of the data or attempts to determine the extent to which the various data sets are internally consistent with respect to accuracy. For all of these reasons, the CO2 -group at Kiel decided that it was worthwhile to attempt to contact all potential holders of data from this area and encourage them to merge their various data sets into a common collection. Further, this group was aware of planned future field work and felt it would be worthwhile to attempt to maximize the usefulness of this work through information sharing and coordination. In order to tackle both of these issues, a workshop was organized and held at the HANSE-Wissenschaftskolleg (HANSE Institute for Advanced Study) in Delmenhorst, Germany from June 9 to 11, 1999, eventually leading to the formulation of the CARINA project.

Initially, the AREA of investigation was defined as the North Atlantic north of 45°N, excluding the Arctic Ocean. Discussions at the workshop led to a revision of the area. The study area for CARINA (Carbon dioxide in the North Atlantic) was then defined as the North Atlantic from 24°N (i.e. south of WOCE transect A5) to 80°N (south of Frahm Strait), including the North Sea. The CARINA steering committee, during a meeting helt in Vigo, Spain, in May 2001 decided to include also data from the South Atlantic to assure storage of these data sets. Some data sets from the Arctic ocean will also be stored in the CARINA data collection ( the acronym now means: Carbon dioxide in the Atlantic Ocean). The scientific focus, however, will remain the North Atlantic. 

The AIM of this project is the nearly complete collection of all CO2 measurements and related parameters. A first rough overview shows about 100 to 150 cruises of interest for this project. The estimated lifetime of the final data set (project) will be between three and five years. Finally the complete data set will be sent to the Carbon Dioxide Information Center (CDIAC) for long-term storage. Most of the data sets are already published and public domain but a few are still unpublished or under investigation.

Since CARINA comprises the community of researchers, that do CO2 (related) meassurements in the (North) Atlantic, it is an ideal communication platform for information exchange among this group. CARINA will serve as a link between major upcoming research programs such as CLIVAR and the CO2 measuring community.

data policy:

The basic principle is: bring something in, get a lot more out. This is not meant against other people interested in CO2 data, that have no own data to contribute (e.g. the modelling community). Data policy became strict in recent programs in a way, that data have to be made public after a short period. Therefore most of the data stored in the CARINA collection are public already. A few data sets, however, are private and in order to encourage people to contribute, access to the data sets is limited to CARINA partners. The PIs themselves are the right people to judge about the status of their data and should therefore be contacted about data from a specific cruise.

The best solution of an easy to use and simple data storage system is a flat file system with ASCII data files on a FTP server. For data service the organization of the files will be by cruise in separate subdirectories. Each subdirectory will contain bottle data, surface data and a documentation for each data file. Since the (free) software Ocean Data View (ODV) is a powerful tool for visualizing oceanic data, the cruise data are also stored in ODV-format.

In this way every principal investigator (PI) will be responsible for her/his data files and the corresponding documentation. He/she should check his/her data and send updates when available. The value of the collection depend very much on the effort of the individual PIs.  Any use of non-public data in presentations and publications require feedback with the PIs about restrictions, acknowledgements or co-authorships. Especially the submission of theses by PhD-candidates shall not be endangered by early publication of their results.

organization:

At this stage, CARINA as an international  project is not officially funded. ( A small German national project from mid 2001 to mid 2003 to support Carina is funded within the JGOFS synthesis project). So a steering committee was formed with: