Assessment of Data Stewardship Practices and its Relevance to Data Quality for NOAA's Climate Data Records

With the increasing scrutiny of climate studies, climate scientists must make every reasonable effort to assure they are using data of the highest quality. Peer-review and transparency are key, and data of questionable or unknown quality can jeopardize both. The NOAA OneStop project is an agency effort to increase the visibility and accessibility of NOAA’s data, while also providing users with detailed assessments of the stewardship practices of those data. The assessment includes detailed information on the data quality, control and monitoring as well as the justification for the assessed value (Peng et al. 2015). The resulting Data Stewardship Maturity Reports (DSMR) are archived within the NOAA Library’s Institutional Repository and they are linked to each dataset in the OneStop system. In addition, the information and rankings within the reports themselves, are included in the collection metadata which will be used for relevancy ranking within the OneStop user interface. This pioneering approach offers users unprecedented insight into the data quality and stewardship practices of NOAA climate data records which allows scientists to make better informed data selections for their purposes, which in turn will lead to more impactful climate study results. This presentation will describe the DMSR and the results for NOAA’s climate data records.