170 Oceanography | Vol.24, No.1 
The variables required by the users 
were broad, as expected. Previous 
analysis (ICES, 2009) suggested that 
the users would require information on 
ice cover and, to a much lesser degree, 
salinity This presumption appeared to 
be incorrect (Figure 2), as salinity was 
ranked third by the users and ice cover 
was not highlighted as that important. 
Many physical oceanographic products 
are coming online, but the ranking near 
the top of the list of biophysical products 
suggests that researchers also need inte 
grated coupled analysis from chemical 
and biological oceanography. The high 
score for fish-related products, such as 
ichtyoplankton abundance and distribu 
tion, suggests that, within the fishery 
science user community, these data are 
now regarded as part of operational 
oceanography. In the future, developing 
such products and including them in 
the product catalogue will require close 
collaboration between environmental 
and fishery oceanography researchers. 
Results of the survey challenge the 
current restricted focus of operational 
oceanography on real-time ocean 
observing and continuous forecasting. 
We interpret “operational” as being 
service oriented, delivered on demand, 
and generic (Nowlin and Malone, 2003). 
These characteristics are being met by 
real-time observatories and forecast 
products. However, researchers in fish 
eries and environmental science indicate 
that they need high-quality time series 
(historic data) that are regularly updated 
and flexible in terms of spatial and 
temporal limits and resolutions more 
than they need real-time and short-term 
forecasts. Recently, long time-series of 
products have become publicly available 
through MyOcean from hindcast and 
reanalyses (Bahurel et al., 2009), a move 
toward remedying this disconnect. Users 
also requested forecasts that are either 
seasonal or multiannual, something 
that science still cannot reliably provide, 
while there is little interest in five-day 
forecasts from this community. 
Although the survey highlights 
user needs, it also suggests that data 
providers must consider communica 
tion with, and education of, data users 
(Polfeldt, 2006). Target users did not 
seem to understand the magnitude of 
data available, which has implications for 
its use and manipulation. For example, 
requests for monthly average fields on a 
10 x 10 km horizontal, 10-m depth bin 
vertical resolution for the North Sea for 
the past 40 years cannot be accommo 
dated via ASCII file formats. Either users 
will need to familiarize themselves with 
scientific data formats, such as NetCDF, 
or providers will need to incorporate 
new Web applications and services to 
allow less-familiar users to preselect 
subsets of data and download them in 
a choice of formats (e.g., THREDDS, 
Live Access Servers, Dapper). In our 
experience, fisheries scientists have been 
overwhelmed when asked what data 
they want, so they request everything. 
These scientists then complained that 
they could not cope with the large size 
and awkwardness of the data when they 
were delivered. To improve this situa 
tion, interaction between producers and 
users must be continual so that products 
evolve to serve users’ changing needs 
and expectations. As environmental 
and fishery managers integrate more 
data in the spatial dimension, and data 
delivery becomes more operational, 
product requests are likely to change 
rapidly. Challenges associated with 
data delivery, such as data quality, data 
ownership, and lack of influence on 
their use, are often raised as concerns 
(Lamb and Davidson, 2002), and these 
concerns can only be addressed by trans 
parent communication. 
Often, the lack of citable sources for 
the data products reduces the appli 
cability of products for the research 
community. Attributing data to “grey” 
sources becomes a problem when 
publishing in peer-reviewed publica 
tions. Editors, reviewers, and scientists 
need to find a solution to this issue, and 
oceanographic data providers should be 
encouraged to publish their operational 
oceanographic products in the peer- 
reviewed literature. The rapid growth 
of both modeling and remote-sensing 
capabilities has led to the frequent 
production of new products at short 
time intervals, with older versions of a 
model run or algorithm often being diffi 
cult to access. The ongoing International 
Oceanographic Data and Information 
Exchange-Scientific Committee on 
Oceanic Research (IODE-SCOR) project 
on data citation could also provide a 
possible way to break down this barrier 
(Blower et al., 2009; IOC, 2008). 
It appears that the producers of 
operational oceanographic products 
are investing in the development of 
tools to deliver data in real time and 
at high resolution, and have accord 
ingly built large systems to handle these 
kinds of requests. However, this study 
shows a different requirement, where 
research-based users require analysis 
products that aggregate information 
both spatially and temporally. They also 
request historic time-series informa 
tion. This serious mismatch between the 
expectations of the end users and the