Traceable Information in the Fourth National Climate Assessment: Provenance and the Global Change Information System
Abstract
The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) prioritizes managing the National Climate Assessment (NCA) process to maximize the utility and transparency of the report. Over the past six years, USGCRP has invested in establishing and developing the Global Change Information System (GCIS) to manage and present the provenance of information in its reports to benefit scientists, the public, and decisionmakers.
The GCIS is an open-source centralized database of all materials and data used for USGCRP assessments (https://data.globalchange.gov/). The system acts as an advanced, multifaceted bibliography, maintaining traceable provenance records of scientific information and providing access to the original data and research. The GCIS catalogs the cross-links among research papers, researchers, original data, and more and includes links back to authoritative sources for its information. GCIS serves as a key supporting resource for assessments produced by the USGCRP, providing information about the data underpinning them. In addition, the GCIS guides users to global change research produced by the 13 USGCRP member agencies. Both volumes of the National Climate Assessment are providing high levels of traceability, with metadata on citations, figures, authors, organizations, and datasets all navigable in the online portal and with links to original sourcing of the information. We will show examples from the November 2017 Climate Science Special Report and the December 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment. USGCRP has also for the first time established quantitative metrics to track progress in providing sufficient information to be truly useful for all NCA readers.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMPA31D1181S
- Keywords:
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- 3305 Climate change and variability;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 9350 North America;
- GEOGRAPHIC LOCATIONDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1637 Regional climate change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE