Scientific Data Services for Field Campaigns: 62 years and counting - NCAR's Earth Observing Laboratory
Abstract
NCAR has a long history of supporting field campaigns to better understand the atmosphere. Over the past 62 years, it has provided state of the art instrumentation to investigators to explore atmospheric phenomena around the world. From radars and lidars, to instrumented aircraft and boundary layer instrumentation, NCAR has developed, operated and provided support for the use of these tools and their data by the broader research community. The legacy of all this support is the data that has been produced by these field campaigns over the years. Much of the data collected in the early days of atmospheric field campaigns is still available at the NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory's Field Project Data Archive as well as data from more recent campaigns. The archive continues to grow with new field campaigns that are conducted each year.
Over the past 27 years, NCAR's Earth Observing Laboratory has developed a set of comprehensive data services covering the complete life-cycle of national and international scientific field projects. Recognizing that each project is "one-of-a-kind," we use our extensive expertise in atmospheric science, software development, and data management to tailor our services to meet the unique project and investigator requirements. In the project planning phase, we work closely with Principal Investigators (PIs) to define data and software policies, develop web pages with customized content, and to define requirements for data ingest, processing, and archival. During the field phase, we offer a suite of tools to support real-time decision making including the Field Catalog which provides project participants a way to document in-field planning and operations through reports and imagery and monitor project operations. For the project analysis phase, we work with PIs to implement project data policies and to create, populate, and maintain a long-term data archive. We also offer customized data processing to create value-added datasets. The legacy of a scientific project is dependent on how well it and the resultant data and research are ultimately documented and supported long-term. NCAR/EOL has worked with PIs to develop, populate, and maintain an extensive archive of data and metadata from over 500 scientific field campaigns and provides users access to over 12,000 operational and research datasets.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.A53L3061S
- Keywords:
-
- 3354 Precipitation;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 3360 Remote sensing;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 1840 Hydrometeorology;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGY