Integrated atmospheric database with sharing system within the RepOD Open Data Repository
The joint IGF-ICM project will facilitate the collection and use of atmospheric data and enable new research and development work in atmospheric physics as well as numerical modeling. The experience gathered by the IGF-ICM team can be widely used and easily implemented for other UW Units collecting measurement and observation data of various types.
We are pleased to announce that thanks to the cooperation between the Institute of Geophysics, Faculty of Physics UW (IGF), and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at UW (ICM), a multifunctional, integrated database of atmospheric observational and measurement data and simulation results has been designed and built, along with access granted for IGF Atmospheric Physics Department to the ICM RepOD Open Data Repository, as part of the IDUB Priority Research Area III project, which runs from 2021-2023. The IT infrastructure built ensures security, related to the collection, storage, and sharing of scientific data, as well as compliance with the principles of FAIR data – findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability.
The launched database allows secure storage and sharing of both current and archived data from atmospheric measurements conducted continuously by the Radiation Transfer Laboratory and the Remote Sensing Laboratory of IGF. The database can also store data from current and archived measurements of the PolandAOD network, as well as data from measurement campaigns, such as the EUREC4A-ATOMIC project campaign. In order to make the data stored in the database available to the public, it must be placed in the RepOD system. Shared data can be raw or processed, after quality control, compressed into ZIP files, and supplemented with appropriate metadata, i.e. descriptions that characterize the shared dataset.
For the purposes of the integrated database created, a dedicated data collection (Dataverse) was created in the RepOD system for the Atmospheric Physics Department. This is a place where further data sets (Datasets), such as the EUREC4A-ATOMIC dataset can be stored and shared. The RepOD system is based on the open-source Harvard software “The Dataverse Project”. It allows storing, viewing, sharing, and downloading data directly from an Internet browser. Sharing a dataset in RepOD also allows it to be integrated into other ecosystems, such as OpenAIRE. Currently, there is no limit to the size of the dataset shared in RepOD, but a single uploaded ZIP file cannot exceed 5.0 GB. Use of RepOD is free and open to all users, but some features, related to storing and sharing data publicly, require prior registration.
Datasets deposited in RepOD are assigned a DOI number. The DOI number is pre-assigned to the dataset when it is deposited, even before publication. This makes it possible to link the data to the publication by indicating the corresponding DOI in the publication, without the need to share the data before the publication appears. Activation of the DOI number occurs when the collection is activated. Both the description of the collection (Metadata) and the dataset itself (Dataset), in accordance with RepOD’s regulations, are always made available under a CC0 license. However, it is possible to choose a different license for individual files in the collection.
The joint IGF-ICM project will facilitate the collection and use of atmospheric data and enable new research and development work in atmospheric physics as well as numerical modeling. The IGF-ICM team continues to work on further development of the database. Among other things, it is planned to add more laboratories to the database, with the implementation of automatic transfer of acquired measurement data, and to improve the management of the process of backing up and sharing data. The experience gathered by the IGF-ICM team can be widely used and easily implemented for other UW Units collecting measurement and observation data of various types.
Source: IGF UW
