FY 1984

FOCUS—Fisheries Oceanography Cooperative Users System

McConaghy, D.C., M.J. McPhail, P.D. Moen, and K.S. Parker

NOAA Tech. Memo. ERL PMEL-50, NTIS: PB84-145689, 74 pp (1983)

Because of increased pressure on living marine resources, scientific interest is being focused on relationships between environmental fluctuations and the interannual variability of fish stocks. Understanding these relationships demands the availability of comprehensive environmental data sets, in a user friendly form and on time and space scales that are applicable to fisheries. In response to this need, NOAA's Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Center (NWAFC) and Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) have jointly developed a data base management system known as FOCUS (Fisheries Oceanography Cooperative Users System) for use in investigations on ocean-fishery variability and interactions in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. The system offers the ability to associate, join and directly analyze two or more data types from various environmental and fisheries data sets and computer systems in order to develop statistical summaries, time series plots, contour plots and other integrated data analyses. This report presents a technical description of how FOCUS establishes software compatibility among existing data sets and analysis packages within a distributed data base environment.