Peter Cornillon

I study the ocean surface as satellites see it — the fronts, eddies and temperature structure that thermal infrared and microwave sensors have been recording for more than forty years — and I build the data systems that make those records usable by other people.

I joined the University of Rhode Island in 1975, on the Ocean Engineering faculty, and moved to the Oceanography faculty at the Graduate School of Oceanography in 1980. I became emeritus in 2023. Emeritus at URI means I have stopped teaching; it does not mean I have stopped doing science. I work on research full time, and I remain based at GSO.

My training is not in oceanography. I took my B.S. in engineering physics and my Ph.D. in experimental high energy physics, both at Cornell, and came to the ocean by way of the instruments. That has shaped how I work ever since: most of my career has been spent on the measurement itself — what the sensor actually recorded, how much of it is noise, and whether the number you pull out of an archive means what you think it means.

Four threads, all of them active. The first two are the reason the archive described below exists.

For roughly fifteen years, from the early 1990s through the mid-2000s, the larger part of my working life went into a problem that was not oceanography at all: how a scientist at one institution could read a binary dataset held at another without first downloading it, converting it, and hoping the two formats agreed.

I was PI on the development of what became the OPeNDAP data access protocol, which lets a client open a remote dataset over the network as though it were a local file, request only the subset it needs, and receive it in a form its own software already understands. I served as president of the OPeNDAP project from 2000 to 2006. The related work of those years included the National Virtual Ocean Data System (NVODS), serving GODAE data and products to the ocean community, the OPeNDAP Data Connector, and the integration of remote data access into scientific workflow systems.

The protocol outlived the project that produced it. It is now a routine part of how the earth science community distributes data — and it is what the SST archive described below is served over, which is the sense in which this thread and the current one are the same thread.

A recurring theme of my career: the science is only as good as the community's ability to get at the data. Everything below is open and in active use.