Publishing data on future rainfall extremes in support of a journal publication

In the pic­ture: Gaby Grün­de­mann and Ruud van der Ent on a rainy walk

PhD researcher Gaby Grün­de­mann and super­vi­sor Ruud van der Ent study future rain­fall extremes. They have recent­ly uploaded their data to the 4TU.ResearchData repos­i­to­ry, in sup­port of their jour­nal pub­li­ca­tion in Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Earth & Envi­ron­ment (Nature Pub­lish­ing Group). They explain why their research is of inter­est and high­light the impor­tance of shar­ing their research data.

Their research is high­ly rel­e­vant for soci­ety and could be used as a wake-up call. “We try to get a bet­ter grasp of how rain­fall extremes are chang­ing in the future. The great­est extremes increase rel­a­tive­ly more than the com­mon extremes,” Ruud explains.  “Rain­fall extremes are expect­ed to get worse in the future,” Gaby adds. “We have to realise that we are not set-up for these very rare events and we have to upgrade our sys­tems to be able to deal with these heav­ier storms in the future.”

The jour­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Earth & Envi­ron­ment requires all authors to upload the data sup­port­ing their pub­li­ca­tion. How­ev­er, Gaby and Ruud already had in mind to pub­lish their data. “I believe that with such impact­ful research, it is good that oth­er researchers can check the under­ly­ing data and repro­duce it,” Ruud says. “Ten years ago, when I did my PhD, shar­ing data was very uncom­mon.” Gaby: “I think that oth­er researchers could also use our data as a start­ing point for their own research, based on what we have already done.”

It was not the first time for Gaby to use the 4TU.ResearchData repos­i­to­ry and she had a great expe­ri­ence. “The repos­i­to­ry is not only free but also sup­port­ed by our insti­tute,” Gaby explains. “The process to upload the data was straight­for­ward, quick, and smooth. The 4TU.Researchdata team helped me with the meta­da­ta and sug­gest­ed some mod­i­fi­ca­tions. More­over, it’s good to know that the data are stored safe­ly.”

Links to the dataset and the jour­nal pub­li­ca­tion:

• Dataset: Scripts and data for “Rarest rain­fall events will see the great­est rel­a­tive increase in mag­ni­tude under future cli­mate change” (https://doi.org/10.4121/20531376.v1)
• Jour­nal pub­li­ca­tion: Grün­de­mann, G. J., van de Giesen, N., Brun­ner, L., & van der Ent, R. (2022). Rarest rain­fall events will see the great­est rel­a­tive increase in mag­ni­tude under future cli­mate change. Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Earth & Envi­ron­ment, 3(1), 235. (https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022–00558‑8)