Increasing Access to the Results of NSF-Funded Scientific Research at NCAR

In 2015, the Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research launched the Data Publication and Stewardship (DPS) Project. The goal behind this effort was to substantially increase the amount of publicly accessible data collected from EOL field projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) between 2005 and 2015, as these data products represent an invaluable resource for initializing numerical prediction models, calibrating and validating satellite retrieval techniques, and for scientific research. Along with improving online data access, the project also entailed improving metadata for previously archived datasets; developing field project webpages for all campaigns; creating an EOL publications database query on the EOL Drupal website (with metrics tools); assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to quality controlled datasets and publications relating to the datasets; and finally gathering metrics on all EOL publications and data holdings.

After completion of the DPS project a follow on project, known as the In Situ Facility (ISF) Data Stewardship Project was initiated in 2016. The primary objectives of this project were to extend archival of quality controlled in-situ data to the EOL data archive to include data sets collected between 1994 and 2004; to collect appropriate metadata describing project objectives, instrumentation, data parameters and data quality control procedures; and link these to the respective datasets and update existing project web pages. After completion of these two projects, 304 EOL datasets collected between 1994 and 2017 had been successfully loaded, along with metadata, to the EOL archive and 1398 new DOI’s were minted. A total of 155 web pages were reviewed for content and updated where needed, and 41 new Drupal field project pages were created. A total of 5,420 publications were identified by the new database publication querying tool and 1,721 were identified as relevant to EOL and assigned DOIs. Regarding metrics of all EOL data holdings, it was determined that EOLs repository includes 1300 datasets and that 14,700 users have placed over 114,000 data orders totaling approximately 32 TB of online data, since 1995. These projects were a significant effort that led to considerable progress in the Laboratory’s efforts to increase the access of results from federally funded field campaigns.