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This draft site is a starting point for planning data management activities for selected NOAA components of the International Arctic System for Observing the Atmosphere (IASOA). IASOA is a lead project for the Atmosphere Observing System IPY proposal topic cluster.
It may be helpful to think in terms of categories of data collections:
Of particular relevance to SEARCH is the definition of data collections that fall into one of three functional categories depending on their use and applications: (1) research, (2) community, and (3) reference data collections. Research data collections are traditionally those data collected by individual Principal Investigator projects, which are often not made available to the wider scientific community for a year after collection. In contrast, community data collections are those data collected as part of a scientific network of observations, and are made public a short time after collection once the data have been checked for quality (verified). Community data collections are especially important for a program like SEARCH, which must provide such data quickly to facilitate change detection, attribution, and prediction activities. Reference data collections are data that are generally collected by an operational agency, such as the National Weather Service. While SEARCH management activities need to deal with all three of these data collection types, the success of SEARCH clearly hinges on the effective management of community data. Because of the heterogeneous nature of community data collections in SEARCH, the implementation of effective and efficient data management will require a coordinated distributed data management system.(From Chapter 5, SEARCH Data Management Strategy of the SEARCH Plans for Implementation document).
We need to answer many additional questions, though we may not have the answers now.
High level - we should manage data in accord with IPY Data Committee recommendations. For a quick overview of what this may mean, see the talk on Data Management for the IPY given by Data Committee co-chair Mark Parsons at the IPY Discussion Forum, 13 Nov 2005. We should follow the overlapping recommendations of the SEARCH data committee (Chapter 5 of the Implementation Plan.) Note that these are works in progress.
Mid level - We should meet NOAA requirements (mostly, in regard to metadata, e.g, data should be discoverable through the NOAA National Data Centers systems). Large planned data access and distribution systems that we may wish to participate in include the Arctic Council's Arctic Portal, and the Discovery, Access, and Delivery of Data for the International Polar Year (DADDI) project. (DADDI will prototype a portal to distributed data sources using XML-based Web services). Both DADDI and the Arctic Council's Arctic Portal are in very early planning stages
Low level - Where will the work actually get done and who does what? (Who: PIs, NOAA@NSIDC and, potentially, partners including NSIDC DAAC (NASA funded), NSIDC Arctic Data Coordination Center (NSF funded) and NCAR. Clearly there will be international partners, since IASOA is an international project.) Exactly what needs to be done, for each component activity of IASOA? We can start by stating our assumptions about data management for component activities. For example, the following assumptions began a dialog with a scientist proposing a sea ice mass balance field experiment with minimal resources for data management. The result in this case would be a "research" data collection (see categories above).
I look forward to working with you to meet your data management needs. - Florence Fetterer, NSIDC's NOAA Liaison
Last updated 30 Dec 2005 - FF
