The OOI Ocean Data Lab Project

The National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is advancing our ability to understand the natural world by collecting large quantities of data to address complex oceanographic processes. This expanded access to data also provides professors in the geosciences with new opportunities to engage undergraduate students in authentic data experiences using real-world data sets to teach geoscience processes.

However, students struggle to work with data based on their limited experience and exposure to different data types and sources. Also, supporting students in engaging with the data can be challenging for professors too, as there is a lack of adequate tools to easily digest and manipulate large data sets for in-class learning experiences.

Therefore, the OOI Ocean Data Lab Project (formerly called Data Explorations), with funding from NSF, is developing, testing, refining, and disseminating easy to use, interactive Data Explorations and Data Lab Notebooks that will allow undergraduates to use authentic data in accessible ways while being easy for professors to integrate into their teaching.

Recent Blog Posts

Picture snapshots from the discrete vs. continuous activity.
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Discrete vs. Continuous Data

There are two key benefits of ocean serving systems: they collect data over long time periods, and in high-resolution. Many oceanographic experiments rely on a single cruise or mooring deployment. But when a location is designated as part…
July workshop participants use a bright window to compare multiple graphs on top of each other

August 2019 Community Newsletter

Here's a quick snapshot of what's in this Data Labs project update: Updates from our June & July Workshops New Data Explorations in Development Ocean Sciences 2020 - Call for Abstracts Project EDDIE Module Development Workshop Updates…
Data from May 2019 at the Pioneer Central Inshore Profiler Mooring
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Caution… Real Data Ahead!

I love diving into data and discovering new things about the ocean, and we've been doing quite a bit of that lately*. But one of the things that really amazes me about the OOI dataset, is that you don’t have to dig far to find some…
The Rutgers University Inn patio

May 2019 Community Newsletter

Next Up: Our June OOI Data Lab Workshop We’re excited about our next Data Lab Development workshop starting on June 1st, here on our “home campus” in New Brunswick, NJ. Ten professors, representing community colleges, primary undergraduate…
The March 2019 OOI Data Labs workshop featured 20 participants and staff from around the country.

Our first Ocean Data Labs workshop is in the books!

Congratulations to our first OOI Data Lab workshop cohort! In March, we welcomed 20 professors from universities, community colleges, and primary undergraduate institutions to the Chauncey Center in Princeton, NJ, for our first weeklong development…

Scattering Data to See Correlations

The most popular data visualizations in oceanography are probably timeseries plots and maps.  But I suspect a strong third is the scatterplot. While a timeseries plot can show how a variable changes in time, and maps can show variation…