Benefiting from a continuously updated time series of climate data

Her­man Russ­chen­berg (Atmos­pher­ic Remote Sens­ing, TU Delft) takes part in the CESAR con­sor­tium (Cabauw Exper­i­men­tal Site for Atmos­pher­ic Research). This con­sor­tium oper­ates a large set of instru­ments to study the atmos­phere and its inter­ac­tion with the land sur­face.

One of these instru­ments is the TU Delft IRCTR driz­zle radar, IDRA in short. It is locat­ed on top of the 213 metre high tow­er, locat­ed next to the vil­lage of Cabauw between Gou­da and Utrecht. IDRA mea­sures driz­zle (very fine rain), pre­cip­i­ta­tion, and low clouds with a high spa­tial and tem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion.

Her­man Russ­chen­berg

The long-term oper­a­tion of IDRA will sup­port the CESAR objec­tive to mon­i­tor trends in atmos­pher­ic changes.  The IDRA weath­er radar mea­sure­ments con­sist of a large time series of numer­i­cal data. The first dataset dates from April 2009 and is con­tin­u­ous­ly updat­ed.

Data open accessible through 4TU.ResearchData

To ensure longevi­ty and easy access, Ruschen­berg and his for­mer col­league Tobias Otto chose to store the datat­sets at 4TU.ResearchData. The data are stored in NetCDF- for­mat and reside on an OPeN­DAP serv­er. They are enriched with meta­da­ta to make the dataset self-explana­to­ry. The datasets are freely avail­able and eas­i­ly acces­si­ble to the users.

The IDRA dataset col­lec­tion is now the largest col­lec­tion in the 4TU.ResearchData repos­i­to­ry and is viewed an aver­age of 200 times a month.

“Data are only valu­able when they are eas­i­ly acces­si­ble and well-doc­u­ment­ed. Our radars pro­duce lots of data for cli­mate research. We have to acquire long time series, span­ning over many years, to detect poten­tial trends in the vari­a­tion of clouds that may be due to cli­mate change. With­out 4TU.ResearchData data man­age­ment would not have been as easy as it is now”, accord­ing to Her­man Russ­chen­berg.

Increasing efficiency and findability

In 2010 the IDRA, was the first dataset in the 4TU.ResearchData archive which was giv­en a dig­i­tal object iden­ti­fi­er (DOI). Due to this per­ma­nent link, the IDRA dataset is much eas­i­er to find on the dig­i­tal high­way.

Tobias Otto at that time :  “This made IDRA more vis­i­ble to the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. It has tak­en some time to set up the data archiv­ing process and to cre­ate the meta­da­ta. But we save that time now by being able to eas­i­ly access our data”.

The data are also used for edu­ca­tion; not only at TU Delft but also else­where, thus enhanc­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion. With­in the Euro­pean ERASMUS pro­gramme, two stu­dents from Politec­ni­co di Bari (Italy) who have already been expe­ri­enced to work with IDRA data came to Delft to do parts of their MSc project with them.

The future for the IDRA data seems bright:  “We expect that in the near future, IDRA data will be used even more in var­i­ous research projects, for exam­ple to val­i­date and refine high­res­o­lu­tion atmos­pher­ic sim­u­la­tions”.

Link to dataset on 4TU.ResearchData
Cov­er image by Patri­cia Alexan­dre via Pix­abay