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The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS), a Regional Coastal Ocean Observing System (RCOOS) nested in a National Backbone of coastal observations, developed and maintains a centralized repository (hereafter referred to as the Portal) to aggregate and disseminate the region’s near real-time oceanographic data to provide timely information about the environment of the United States portion of the Gulf of Mexico and its estuaries to assist decision-makers, including researchers, government managers, industry, military, educators, emergency responders, and the general public. The data currently are from voluntary local (regional) data providers and federal observing facilities in the Gulf of Mexico.

NOTE: The development and continuing maintenance of this data portal is part of the U.S. NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), which is the U.S contribution to the international Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

The Portal and supplemental data repositories to support GCOOS goals and objectives, such as the Hypoxia-Nutrient Data Portal, were developed to facilitate the sharing of data, model outputs and related products for the benefit of all stakeholders. The Portal supports policy-making, natural resource management, scientific research and the increasing need for data to resolve issues related to global climate change and public health. The deployed and operational version of the Portal is an automated computerized network-accessible data collection and delivery system. These data sources are maintained under a variety of data standards and archival schemas, and the Portal serves as the interface to these data, model output and products via automated standards-based machine-to-machine (M2M) service interfaces, and through web-based human-accessible graphical user interfaces (i.e., HTML standards). The same set of services provide features that facilitate interoperability with other regional data systems, as well as with the federal backbone comprised of systems typified by, but not limited to, that of the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC).