Assistant System (Project Progress)#

Atarrabi (Basque: good weather spirit) is a web-based software system which provides the following planned functionality:

• It helps the researcher to review and prepare his or her (meteorological) data for publication (scientific quality assurance).
• It supports the publication agent to double-check the data submitted by the researcher and to perform technical quality assurance.
• It registers the persistent identifier and the landing page at WDCC via the DataCite publication service.
• It is a project objective to support the process for publishing meteorological data archived at the World Data Center for Climate (WDCC).

Have a look at Development and Views on Atarrabi and our tutorial document to get an impression of the system functionality and the user interface.

Production Infrastructure#

The following figure shows the infrastructure of the production environment. The Atarrabi Publication System is hosted at World Data Center for Climate (WDCC) in Hamburg. It imports metadata from experiments stored in the CERA2 database and uses the CERA2 users LDAP database for authentication. For release 2.1 it is planned to call a web service for DOI registration provided by DataCite.

Supported primary data types#

This project was motivated by the growing demand for data publication in the field of meteorology. Right now the assistant system supports the publication of two primary data types:

Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 - CMIP5 (since Atarrabi V1.0)

The system is able to support the Quality Control Level 3 with STD-DOI publication of CMIP5 data. These are data from a new set of coordinated climate model experiments and thus include simulations for IPCC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fifth Assessment Report on the earths climate. These experiments comprise the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. The WDCC is responsible for the quality assurance process within CMIP5, including the STD-DOI data publication. The granularity of the publication entity in CMIP5 is an experiment, determined by the Data Reference Syntax (DRS).

For these entities metadata is collected in the following Atarrabi fields:

• General Information on the entity
• Authors of the data
• DOI contact
• Contributors to the entity
• Relations to other publications
• Coverage of the entity
• Data quality assurance

These sections ask the author to give information to enable the publication under the guidelines of STD-DOI. The responsible data archives of CMIP5 (PCMDI, BADC, WDCC) share the responsibility and workload of the quality check performance. Atarrabi also gives the author the opportunity to enhance the data with additional quality information.

Observational data (since Atarrabi V1.5)

The system is able to perform a Scientific Quality Assurance on Meteorological Observational data. These may be data from meteorological stations, remote sensing instruments or whole field campaigns. For these entities metadata is collected in the following fields:

• General Information on the experiment
• Authors of the data
• DOI contact
• Contributors to the experiment
• Relations to other publications
• Coverage of the experiment
• Instruments used in the experiment
• data quality assurance

These sections ask the author to give information to enable the publication under the guidelines of STD-DOI. It also give the author the opportunity to enhance the data, to give it more value for the users. This is especially important for the data quality assurance. All screens are well documented to guide the author through the different steps. This is done with the aim to increase the possibility of a good result for the authors and the users of the data.