Climateprediction.net Data Protocol

Status: Draft
Last Modified: 2006-02-15

This document outlines the principles adopted by the Climateprediction.net project and the British Atospheric Data Centre (BADC) regarding archival of Climateprediction.net data at the BADC. The detailed implementation of these principles will be further described in the Climateprediction.net Data Management Plan.

The aims of the Data Protocol are

to encourage rapid dissemination of scientific results from the Climateprediction.net project;
to protect the rights of the individual scientists collaborating on the Climateprediction.net project;
to ensure the quality of the data and metadata in the Climateprediction.net archive.

These aims may conflict at times and it is hoped that the provisions of the protocol resolve these conflicts fairly.

The designated data centre for the Climateprediction.net project is the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC).
All raw data submitted to the BADC will be made available to PI's upon submission.
Data submitted to the BADC will be periodically validated and incorporated into the Climateprediction.net archive in accordance with the Data Management Plan. The latest date by which data must be submitted will be June 30th 2007.
Access to data within the Climateprediction.net archive will be restricted to users given authorisation by a designated Climateprediction.net scientist for a period of 2 years after the data is placed in the archive.
Following the restricted access period (see 4.) data in the Climateprediction.net archive will be made freely available to all users.
Data users are requested to contact a designated Climateprediction.net scientist prior to use of any of the data. Climateprediction.net scientists may request acknowledgement (or joint authorship) in any publications based on, using or quoting the data.
Data submitted to the BADC must be in the data format agreed between Climateprediction.net and the BADC (namely NetCDF, where possible conforming to the CF metadata standard). Details of the internal structure of data and metadata are described in the Data Management Plan. It is the responsibility of Climateprediction.net to inform the BADC of any variation in the structure of the data or metadata that will impact the validation procedures at the BADC.
The BADC will produce metadata for each Climateprediction.net simulation to facilitate searching of the archive. This metadata will be made available to the Climateprediction.net project to allow external indexing of the archive.