The International Surface Pressure Databank Version 4: Data Access and User Services

The International Surface Pressure Databank (ISPD) is the world’s largest collection of global surface and sea-level pressure observations. It is developed by extracting observations from established international archives, through international cooperation with data recovery facilitated by the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative, and directly by contributing universities, organizations, and countries. Version 4 of the ISPD covers the period 1722—2015 and is comprised primarily of data components from land station observations, marine observing systems, and tropical cyclone best track pressure reports. It is also used as observational input to version 3 of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CRv3) project, and the resultant quality control and assimilation feedback information from the 20CRv3 are included in the ISPD observational records.

The ISPD is archived in the Research Data Archive (RDA, https://rda.ucar.edu/) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This presentation will highlight the strategies the RDA employs to support reliable and flexible data access and value added user services to the ISPD. Topics will include general data access support and subsetting services that allow users to extract temporal, regional, and station-level subsets from the archive. A robust metadata database is maintained to support a range of data search and discoverability mechanisms, and all ISPD observational records are stored in a MySQL database that facilitates the various data access and subsetting services. Highlights covering these value-added features will be explained and the open free access from NCAR will be briefly described.