SDSR2013IASOA

The International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere (IASOA) was initiated as an International Polar Year (IPY) project (Darby et al. 2011) to address key atmospheric science questions through coordinating the considerable atmospheric observing assets at nine (now ten) pan-Arctic observatories (http://iasoa.org). IASOA has since been accepted as a Sustaining Arctic Observing Network (SAON) Task, been endorsed as an International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) Activity and been recognized as a contributor to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW) CryoNet implementation. The mission of IASOA is to advance cross-site research objectives from independent Arctic atmospheric observatories through: (1) strategically developing comprehensive observational capacity; (2) facilitating data access and usability through a single gateway; and (3) mobilizing contributions to synergistic science and socially-relevant services derived from IASOA assets and expertise. As a starting point for IPY legacy activities, the IASOA steering committee identified enhanced, cross-site data sharing through an IASOA-specific data access portal as a focus for on-going consortium activities. The design intent of the portal has been to display the data inventories of all IASOA observatories in a succinct table (Data-at-a-Glance) and provide the most proximal access links available to those datasets. The IASOA data access portal is not intended to replace the functions of existing archives. This succinct summary of data availability supports cross-site and interdisciplinary synthesis science activities. Efforts to enhance the legacy IASOA data access portal functionality have focused on two areas: developing a comprehensive and coherent data vocabulary for IASOA data; implementing an interoperable metadata standard for all IASOA data.

For an interoperable metadata standard, we reviewed the existing standards and determined that ISO 19115 would provide us with a robust standard, capable of capturing the documentation of interest to our community. It is also a widely used standard. The importance of this is that many IASOA-relevant archives including Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) and Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW) already describe their datasets in ISO-19115. Through harvesting existing metadata, IASOA can both make rapid progress on populating the portal and create a mechanism for distributed metadata maintenance through the archives. Of the ~2000 total datasets that the IASOA consortium could share, we estimate that more than 1500 already have metadata that can be readily harvested from existing archives. This is a considerable leveraging of existing efforts.

Three IASOA observatories currently archive data at the DOE ARM archives: Barrow, Summit and Eureka. There are a total of 150 datasets associated with these three observatories (mostly Barrow). While the DOE-ARM archive does collect a significant amount of metadata, it is not currently encoded according to the ISO standard. This proposal will initiate collaborative actions between IASOA data management and the DOE archive to address this gap. So doing will increase the visibility of currently archived DOE-ARM Arctic data. It will also promote the use of this data in the context of the other observatories within the IASOA consortium. Of further lasting benefit to the DOE archive will be the creation of code to export from the archive in the ISO format.

Timeline