The Japan Fisheries Agency (JFA) also stores the hydrographic observation data in the North Pacific Region from 1963 to 1993 (Fig.2). The dataset, called “POD”, includes about 53,000 profiles;about 92,000 profiles obtained by 10 National Fisheries Research Institutes, about 390,000 profiles by 52 Prefectural Fisheries Experimental Stations (PFES), and about 48,000 profiles by Fisheries High Schools (Fig.3). In particular, each PFES observed in the fixed stations of near-shore and coastal area monthly or seasonally (Fig.4). The one of task of MIRC is to make the ocean atlas in the North Pacific Region by fine mesh using JODC database and POD which quality checks has been performed. Therefore the MIRC established the quality control procedures and developed the quality control (QC) software for data originator of PFES.
Fig. 2 Location of serial station data (POD) collected by Japan Fisheries Agency from 1963 to 1993.
The quality control software, named“POD-QC”, runs on Microsoft Windows. The results of quality check are displayed graphically in various ways, and so erroneous data are easily found and corrected even by non-experts, such as part-time worker in any PFES. The POD of each PFES are re-arranged in time-serial dataset, and then are divided into cmise data by identifying several days interval between stations. Header information and ship-track are displayed for each cruise, and erroneous information such as extraordinary ship speed is indicated with red colored tracks (Fig. 5). The error data can be corrected in data view/edit window directly. This procedure is very efficient to find errors in header information such as position, date, time and so on. Then, temperature, salinity and density profiles can be shown for selected observation point(s). Range and gradient checks for temperature and salinity, and density inversion check can be easily made in this window:erroneous data detected by criterions set by World Ocean Database 1998 of US-NODC/Ocean Climate Laboratory are shown also with red colored curves automatically (Fig. 6). The T-S diagram, horizontal and vertical quantity distributions, error list, and summary report of observation are also obtainable through POD-QC.
