Data Curation in Climate and Weather: Transforming Our Ability to Improve Predictions through Global Knowledge Sharing

Climate and Weather are of increasing interest to the scientific community and the general public. Data curation and stewardship are essential building blocks in the science community’s quest to better understand how natural climate and weather systems behave and how activities of human civilization are altering the natural system. Rudimentary observations of the atmosphere and ocean have been collected for over one hundred years and proxity proxy measurements of the climate can trace our planet’s climatic history for millions of years. These observations coupled with the rapid advances in technology, such as powerful computers, rapid access to massive amounts of data, and satellite observations, have allowed innovative techniques to be used to understand and predict the planet’s climate and weather. 1 This paper is based on the paper given by the authors at the 4th International Digital Curation Conference, December 2008; received July 2008, published October 2009. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. ISSN: 1746-8256 The IJDC is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre. Data Curation in Climate and Weather 69