The Future of Storing, Provisioning and Using Paleo CO₂ Data

Paleo CO₂ data have traditionally been stored in a variety of formats with hundreds of measurements spread across multiple repositories. This makes it time consuming to interact with the data, whether for plotting, analysis or simply understanding what information is currently available. A group of experts aim to resolve these issues, starting by collating measurements spanning the latter half of the last 100 million years when atmospheric CO₂ concentrations ranged across the 100s of ppm. In the longer term, all proxy CO₂ data will be collated into a single, highly detailed repository using a new standardized data structure. There are numerous benefits to this approach, including: enabling rapid reanalysis of existing data, tracking updates to published datasets and enforcing a high level of transparency for every data point and, by extension, the database as a whole. Building on this database, a wealth of resources will be provided at paleo-co2.org. The website will include detailed descriptions of each paleo CO₂ proxy, explanatory animations and videos, interactive graphs that draw information directly from the paleo CO₂ database and open source software for paleo CO₂ data analysis. Here, we present the format of the website, the technical details of how data are stored and how this will aid the paleo CO₂ community to improve understanding of CO₂ in the 100s of ppm and beyond. paleo-co2.org is hoped to become the canonical resource for storage of, and access to, paleo CO₂ data.