The Unidata Program Center (UPC) is searching for atmospheric science researchers or research groups to participate in a pilot project aimed at designing and implementing robust data management workflows. The project aims to assist at least three community partners representing modest research projects of different scales in the implementation of data management processes that satisfy National Science Foundation and other federal funding agency requirements.
Beyond simply satisfying current funding proposal requirements, the project hopes to test effective methods of collecting, transforming, storing, and sharing atmospheric science data. The methods used will be documented and polished for broad community use as examples serving to guide similar projects. If successful, the project will give researchers tools to satisfy funding agency requirements while making their data more widely discoverable, available, open, and usable by others in the community.
Because large research projects often have dedicated data management resources and are better served by institutional data management and archive resources than smaller research efforts, this project focuses on relatively small research groups. UPC staff will work with the selected partners to assemble appropriate data management resources; design effective workflows for the collection, processing, sharing, and storage of project data; and create data management planning documents suitable for submission to funding agencies. In order to test potential tools and processes in a variety of settings, UPC is looking for partners conducting research projects of approximately the following sizes:
- Very small — at most one researcher and one graduate student
- Small — teams of three to five individuals
- Medium — teams larger than five individuals
If you are interested in participating in this pilot project, please provide us with information on your project by submitting this short online form by November 1, 2015. Please contact Josh Young (jwyoung@ucar.edu) for additional details.
We have recently participated in NSF funded OWLeS and PECAN, and NASA funded DISCOVER-AQ. For each we had to develop DM plans.
For these projects we have one PI (DISCOVER-AQ) and 8-15 mostly undergraduate students (2-3 graduate students), or two PIs (OWLeS and PECAN) with 21 and 17 undergraduate students, respectively. I'm guessing that this makes us a medium size according to your scale.
I wonder if the size should be determined, in part, by number of instruments comprising the deployment. The DM plan will be more complex for projects deploying a variety of different instruments (e.g. Lidar, Sodar, radiosonde, ground based towers, aircraft etc.) verses one or two instruments.
Posted by Richard Clark on October 16, 2015 at 05:44 AM MDT #