ARM Developers Seek to Improve Data Flow

 
Published: 7 September 2012
After a full day discussing all things data related, participants at the ARM Developers Meeting relaxed on the shores of the Columbia River with a low-key game of cricket.

Once a year, representatives from ARM’s External Data Center, Data Quality Office, Data Archive, and Data Management Facility gather with infrastructure management, scientists, and developers of data ingests and value-added products to discuss progress on infrastructure activities related to ARM data. In mid-August, the ARM Developers met at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to review these activities and create a five-year strategy to improve day-to-day operations and efficiencies related to data flow.

Key topics discussed at the Developers Meeting included data versioning, database improvements, on-demand data product generation, delivery of data quality information, and inter-operability with other climate data portals—such as NCAR’s Earth System Grid—to increase efficiency in data flow, data discovery, and delivery. In the long term, the group’s goals are to:

  • share ARM data easily with other agencies by setting metadata standards in compliance with other agencies for ARM products
  • visualize data before ordering data
  • enable users to create custom data sets
  • formalize and implement efficient procedures for adding new instruments, sites, or AMF locations into ARM operational processes
  • visualize the latest updates to data when they change (e.g., due to instrument calibration or algorithm enhancement)
  • take full advantage of high-performance supercomputing capabilities.

With goals from the Developers Meeting in mind, various groups will work on action items in the coming year to monitor and continuously align infrastructure project activities with the five-year strategy.