If you are a student, educator, or researcher in the Earth Science community, your work probably involves a broad range of digital content — web pages, documents, photos, GIS data, instrument data, model data, etc. RAMADDA, the Repository for Archiving and MAnaging Diverse DAta, provides a place to manage all of this digital stuff.

RAMADDA makes it easy to manage all sorts of digital content, from documents and images to scientific data files in a variety of flavors. Data harvesting features allow the system to ingest available data and process spatial, temporal, and faceted metadata automatically for use in the system's search interface. Content can also be added to the system manually. And RAMADDA makes it easy to create engaging web interfaces to display the digital content using a wiki facility.

Unidata is searching for a second round of geoscience researchers or research groups to participate in an NSF-funded pilot project aimed at implementing publicly-available, robust data management workflows. The initial round of this project assisted three atmospheric science projects that collected data including model output, airplane-based lidar data, and observations from a large field campaign. The second round seeks to identify additional community partners with different data management requirements.

In addition to helping researchers satisfy current funding proposal requirements, we hope to test effective methods of collecting, transforming, storing, and sharing atmospheric or related geoscience data. The methods used will be documented and published for broad community application as examples in Unidata's Data Management Resource Center (DMRC), serving to guide similar projects.

Rosetta's wizard interface

By Larissa Gordon

Rosetta, one of Unidata's data transformation tools, is helping the scientific community with the standardization of data. Created by Unidata software engineer Sean Arms, Rosetta is strengthening the science community's ability to standardize raw data by providing an easy way to add appropriate metadata to ASCII files, allowing them to save and store the files in either an ASCII format (e.g. .csv) or in Climate and Forecast (CF)-compliant netCDF files. Most recently, Rosetta has helped Millersville University transform weather balloon data collected as part of a nationwide experiment.

Millersville University has been involved in an experiment known as PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection at Night). The experiment involves eight research laboratories and fourteen Universities. They share the common goal of finding the cause of an increase of mesoscale convective storms (MCSes) that occur at night during the summer months.

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.