NCAR's Earth Observing Laboratory Legacy Field Campaign Archives

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has been involved in field projects for over 50 years and since 1967, the Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL), previously the Atmospheric Technology Division (ATD), has been involved in over 450 field projects. Data/metadata and publications are both legacies of any field project, and for the millions of dollars spent to obtain measurements; EOL has a responsibility to steward the data for future reference and research. Since this work began over 8 years ago, there has been a renewed interest (increased requests and inquiries) in EOL’s field campaign archive data, mainly pertaining to climate related studies and data “reuse”, many by Graduate Students looking for new research topics. In addition, past campaign Principal Investigators (PI)s and previously unknown field data archives at various institutions, are now submitting their data and documentation to EOL (or at least as a backup). There has also been a component of interest driven by scientists returning to previous field campaign locations and are interested in combining similar measurements taken there in the past to enhance their current research.

EOL has unique campaign archives most of which are not available elsewhere. Much of the earlier campaign archives are in poor condition (e.g. lacking complete documentation, undigitized data, unsupported formats, etc.) such that a considerable amount of the data/documentation is unusable or currently unavailable in their present form. Fortunately, there has been considerable interest from past campaign PIs who are retiring and/or are looking for a new “home” archive for their data, and have been very willing to donate their own time and efforts to help in this process. It is their personal legacy as well as the contributions of their research to the scientific community. In the past 5 years, EOL has also been working closely with other groups within NCAR such as the CISL Research Data Archive (RDA), the Library/Archives, and the Digital Image Library to begin to organize and link, holdings, and EOL archives in a consistent manner adhering to agreed upon best data management practices across the institution.

Time is critical in this effort as it is becoming more and more difficult to read old vintage data media (and formats) as well as some campaign participants are now passing away and the danger is that the data, institutional knowledge, and campaign legacy may be lost forever. The purpose of this presentation is to describe the EOL Legacy Field Campaign holdings (i.e. digital data, media, publications, reports, documentation, photos, etc.) and make this data and information available to the rest of the scientific community.