AtMoDat Kickoff Meeting at the DKRZ

On June 20/21, 2019, the AtMoDat project team met for the kickoff meeting at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) in Hamburg. 17 colleagues of the project partners University of Hamburg, University of Leipzig, Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover and the German Climate Computing Center participated in the meeting. New team members were introduced to each other.

The focus of the kickoff meeting was on the exchange of knowledge and experiences of the project partners in the fields relevant for AtMoDat: long term data storage, DataCite DOIs, metadata standards, city climate models, and cloud modeling. A meet-up schedule was set up and first tasks for the first project months were defined. The meeting was very intensive but also very productive.

AtMoDat is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) for three years.

Attendees of the Kick-off meeting for the project AtMoDat at DKRZ.

The project AtMoDat, short for „Atmospheric model data: data quality, curation criteria and DOI Branding“ is funded by BMBF in the framework of a funding scheme aimed at the development and testing of curation criteria and quality standards for research data in the course of the digital transformation of the German research system – the taking up of the project results by the national and international community is explicitly desired.

Up to now, standards established for the quality, organisation and administration of research data in the atmospheric and climate sciences have only been applied in the framework of large, internationally coordinated model intercomparison studies, e.g. CMIP. In the project AtMoDat, these standards are systematically adapted to the needs of smaller specialized communities and climate model intercomparison efforts, since adopting the full CMIP-standard is often not sensible and too laborious.

The AtMoDat-consortium is ideally set-up for this challenge – it is comprised of DKRZ as coordinating institution (Department: Data Management), the University of Hamburg (Meteorological Institute, WG :Mesoscale and Microscale Modelling), the University of Leipzig (Meteorological Institute, WG: Clouds and Global Climate) and the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library Hannover, short: TIB, (Department: Reserch Data).

Use cases considered for the development of the desired standards rely on, a.o., atmospheric model data from

• urban climate research – an area of atmospheric sciences in which data standards for enhancing data reusability are very sparse of inexistent (University of Hamburg)
• small-scale climate model intercomparison projects – an area of climate science for which the standardised introduction of new model diagnostis is exemplarily tested (University of Leipzig)

The developed data standards will be adopted little by little, applied to further existing atmospheric model data sets and evaluated with regards to their universal applicability. The reusability of atmospheric model data in future intercomparison efforts will be achieved through sustainable application of the AtMoDat-developed standards, the associated processes for curation and quality assurance as well as the assignment of discipline-specific DataCite DOI’s (DKRZ, TIB).

The cooperation of internationally connected and renowned infrastructure providers (DKRZ, TIB) and research groups (University of Hamburg, University of Leipzig) in the framework of AtMoDat further provides fruitful links between the communities, which can significantly contribute to the sustainability of the developed research data management components.