Improved search, discovery, and accessibility of field campaign data

 
Poster PDF

Authors

John D. Bell — Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Kathy J. Lazar — Brookhaven National Laboratory
Richard T. Cederwall — Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Alice T. Cialella — Brookhaven National Laboratory
Richard Wagener — Brookhaven National Laboratory
Anne Alexandra Glanville — University of Kansas

Category

Infrastructure & Outreach

Description

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility receives a wide variety of data from different atmospheric instruments regularly deployed during field campaigns. In order to make the data publicly known and accessible to the world’s research community, a description of the data (the metadata) must be entered by knowledgeable ARM personnel into the ARM Field Campaign (FC) Database. ARM metadata includes instrument classes and categories as well as primary measurement types (PMTs) and measurement categories. The ARM website accesses the FC database to populate web pages with information from the campaigns. The Campaigns, Instruments, and Measurements tabs can then be used to identify data of interest via the website. As of June 2010, a significant portion of the field campaign data did not have metadata assignments. The current project addressed this problem by redoubling efforts to assign metadata to past field campaigns, in preparation for the influx of former ASP field campaign data. In the process, a more efficient way of syncing databases was developed. This tool will also lend itself to routine ARM datastream metadata assignments.