FAIR DATA Fund use case: Atmospheric moisture tracking preprocessing with WAM2layers
WAM2layers is a moisture-tracking model (water-accounting model) that can be used to study the transport of water in the atmosphere, from source (surface evaporation) to sink (precipitation) or vice versa.
Building on previous work – Ruud van der Ent, Assistant Professor at TU Delft and FAIR Data Fund grantee, collaborated with the Netherlands eScience Center and researchers from Stockholm University to use the fund for the development and publishing of the following dataset: WAM2layers preprocessed data from 01-01-1941 until 31-10-2014. Version 2. 4TU.ResearchData dataset. https://doi.org/10.4121/00f7fa45-899e-4573-ae23-234f6c5193d0.v2.
The data is generated by the preprocessing step of the moisture tracking model WAM2layers v3. This dataset gives users the possibility to immediately proceed with actual moisture tracking with WAM2layers v3 to determine moisture transport in the atmosphere.
In the project, the team further developed full integration of accessing this dataset ‘on-the-fly’ from within the existing WAM2layers v3 software. New software users can quicker get to do actual moisture tracking for their study area of interest. Experienced users can also test hypotheses about trends, extremes and anomalies of moisture transport without the need to download huge volumes of ERA5-reanalysis data first.
Practical key results
- Access to the preprocessed data on the OPeNDAP data service ‘on-the-fly’ within the WAM2layers software: https://github.com/WAM2layers/WAM2layers/pull/475
- A dataset of almost a century of pre-pocessed moisture tracking data!
The figure shows the accumulated tracked moisture sources of the extreme precipitation event of 13–14 July 2021.
How the FAIR Data Fund supported the project
The FAIR Data Fund allowed the project team to hire a research software engineer (Peter Kalverla, Nederlands E-Science Center) to support the data and software integration. Furthermore, the 4TU.ResearchData team helped with file conversions and further waived the publishing fee for the data of larger storage capacity.
“We are extremely grateful to the team and 4TU.ResearchData in general, for the support offered for our project.” says Ruud van der Ent, Assistant Professor at the Department of Water Management, TU Delft.
