SOLAS and the British Atmospheric Data Centre Charles Kilburn Anne De Rudder

BADC Role in UK SOLAS UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is funding agency Requirement to lodge data for long-term curation and re-use by community BODC is the lead data centre BADC involved in 5 of the UK SOLAS projects Support data providers with formatting and submission Support on atmospheric model datasets to archive Support users with data access according to protocol Access to third party datasets, often UK Met Office and European Centre

Formats NetCDF Climate and Forecasting Metadata Conventions Half of BADC works on developments for discovery, subsetting and auto-plotting which depends on this standard of archived data Second format for Excel users is NASA- Ames which is ASCII with a set header of metadata essentials. Data providers have to do the formatting so this is the key issue towards which we direct the most support

Data ingestion Fixed filename structure of instrument- location-time Web-based uploading facility with auto- checking of filenames and formats Alternatively ftp uploading Each data production tool, observation station and period of deployment is manually entered in the catalogue with as much supporting information as possible

Data quality File-based archive Check for truncated files due to bad transfers Check for metadata standards in file Check filename conforms to standard and agreed instrument names and locations No other quality control – the data could be nonsense

Data dissemination UK SOLAS web page and project sub- pages for project specific information. Links to BODC, docs, format details. Two methods to get data out – web archive browser or ftp. Can only release data after 1 year to UK SOLAS and after 2 years to everyone Users agree to access conditions Non-commercial access only Joint authorship rule within three years of lodging.

Data products Cape Verde Observatory data comes in within about 1 month of collection Also have the Cape Verde trajectory data DODO project aircraft campaign data Expect atmospheric model data and more ground-based instrument data