NCAR/Earth Observing Laboratory's Scientific Data Services for Field Campaigns

NCAR has a long history of supporting field campaigns to better understand the atmosphere. Over the 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 past 62 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 collection continues to grow with new field campaigns that are proposed 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. Plans and policies are developed to meet both funding agency requirements and project-specific scientific goals. During the field phase, we offer a suite of tools to support real-time decision making. The Field Catalog provides project participants a way to document in-field planning and operations through reports and imagery. Catalog Maps, a GIS tool, allows the realtime tracks of in-field assets to be overlaid on a variety of background imagery. As an in-field communication tool, we offer IRC chat to project participants. 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 and quality assurance 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. The poster will highlight datasets and services provided to recent field campaigns, such as the Southern Ocean Clouds Radiation Aerosol Transport Experimental Study (SOCRATES), the Remote sensing of Electrification, Lightning and Mesoscale/microscale Processes with Adaptive Ground Observations (RELAMPAGO) and the Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection(OTREC) projects.