The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has teamed with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to manage the diverse data needs of the Arctic research community supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar Programs (OPP) Division of Arctic Sciences (ARC).
The NSF-funded next-generation Advanced CADIS system (ACADIS) is being designed to serve broad community needs, including, but not limited to, projects funded by OPP/ARC under the Arctic Observing Network (AON), Arctic System Sciences (ARCSS), Arctic Natural Sciences (ANS) and the Arctic Social Sciences Program (ASSP).. The NSF contribution to the IPY included the AON data now housed in this archive. AON continues to be supported by NSF and the multidisciplinary data will be accessible through the ACADIS system before, during, and after the IPY period.
ACADIS will allow scientists to more easily find, access, share, integrate and work with data spanning multiple disciplines, enabling scientific discovery. ACADIS will provide data ingest and access services to scientists, decision-makers and other Arctic stakeholders, as well as archival services to ensure data accessibility through the coming years and decades. NSF recently mandated that investigators develop a viable management plan for data collected or generated by their projects. ACADIS can accept metadata and data now and the project team will work with investigators to fully develop and implement their data management plans.
ACADIS will be implemented and supported based on best practices used during the previous phase of the project, with improvements and modifications to handle the more diverse, multidisciplinary data coming from individual investigators, focused process studies, and field deployments as well as special reanalysis and intercomparison modeling projects. Support activities now focus on extending the ACADIS gateway capabilities for authoring metadata, ingesting data and accessing multi-year datasets. Our focus embraces providing end-to-end data services,, supporting long-term data stewardship, and aiding the community in analysis and visualization of the data. There will be a major focus on improving the usability of all NSF Arctic data and providing services for broad community access.