Finding the Forest in the Trees The Challenge of Combining Diverse Environmental Data (1995) / Chapter Skim
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5 The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
5 The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
Pages 56-65
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From page 56... ...
One prominent example of this is a cooperative program with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and the Institute of Geography in China. While CDIAC does not directly engage in interfacing biological and geophysical data types, its data management program exemplifies the kinds of data gathering, quality control, documentation, and dissemination activities that are a necessary part of many data interfacing exercises.
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From page 57... ...
ORNL is facing significant technical and organizational challenges as it attempts to implement the new functions associated with the ARM Program and the Distributed Active Archive Center. These challenges are representative of those faced by the global change research community as large volumes of data from new sources become increasingly available.
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From page 58... ...
Political considerations sometimes influence the choice of what data to work on. The Chinese climate data project mentioned at the beginning of this chapter reflected a management decision to include a more globally diverse array of data.
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From page 59... ...
CDIAC staff emphasize that they will document the data, increase both the data's and the investigator's visibility, and remove the burden of responding to data requests. They also stress that the investigator will get full credit for the final data product, will have final sign-off authority on the data set, and can submit the data to the center in whatever format the investigator considers desirable.
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From page 60... ...
This data set required integrating four data sets that were not originally intended to be integratedenergy statistics, cement production estimates, gas flaring estimates, and population estimates. In this case, it was frequently necessary to create new data by analyzing or converting existing data.
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Distributing the Data CDIAC staff distribute and publicize their data packages through as many avenues as possible. These include the NASA master directory; electronic bulletin boards; the CDIAC newsletter, CDIAC Communications, with more that 9,000 subscribers in 150 countries; university libraries; catalogs of CDIAC's data and information products; announcements sent to a network of newsletter and journal editors; and a mailing list compiled from conferences, sponsoring agencies, and past data requests.
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From page 62... ...
LESSONS LEARNED A key feature of CDIAC's activities is the staff's understanding that successful data interfacing requires error correction and other quality control activities. Their experience shows clearly the importance of resolving discrepancies between data sets, clarifying ambiguities, investigating the implications of differences in measurement methods, backtracking from derived variables to the original raw data, and creating standardized measurements from a variety of sources.
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From page 63... ...
There is no charge for CDIAC's services, and this helps them build good working relationships with the user community. Not only does the center provide complete data sets with accompanying documentation, they also prepare regional subsets of data or customized combinations of specific data sets on request.
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From page 64... ...
CDIAC emphasizes the providing of original raw data, rather than derived or processed data. For example, the center's staff made a scientific case for obtaining the raw, instead of the derived, data when working on the data that were ultimately published as Numeric Data Package (NDP)
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From page 65... ...
20, Global Grid Point Surface Air Temperature. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn.
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