Background
Testing and documenting the performance of the DART interfaces to large geophysical models requires data storage and access capabilities beyond those provided by Github.com.
As of January 2024, CISL has announced two existing data stores, the NSF NCAR's Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX) and the Research Data Archive (RDA) will be replaced with the Next Generation Geoscience Data Exchange. However, during a question and answer session at the Earth System Data Science Forum held on January 8th, 2024, Doug Schuster confirmed that all data stored in GDEX will be preserved in the Next Generation Geoscience Data Exchange.
About GDEX
GDEX is designed around a paradigm in which users self-publish data by filling out a data request form that documents the dataset.
If approved, a landing page for the dataset is created. See, for example, WACCMX+DART 2009-2010 Hindcasts Experiments. There are options for accessing the data including URLs for accessing files individually, or downloading a ZIP file containing all of the data in a set.
Each dataset is versioned, making it possible to update the dataset when the DART interface changes.
Suggestions for consistency
GCMD Keywords
One of the organizing tools employed within GDEX is the use of Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Keywords. This set of hierarchical keywords is well-established in the Earth Science community. The following two keywords have been added by NASA Earth Data to the GCMD database:
- In the file format category: obs_seq => observation sequence file
- In the project category: NSF NCAR/DART => Data Assimilation Research Testbed
These keywords can be used to tag DART related datasets in GDEX.