Advanced Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (ACADIS) Update
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Witness the Arctic provides information on current arctic research efforts and findings, significant research initiatives, national policy affecting arctic research, international activities, and profiles of institutions with major arctic research efforts. Witness serves an audience of arctic scientists, educators, agency personnel, and policy makers. Witness was published biannually in hardcopy from 1995-2008 (archives are available below) and is currently published online 3-4 times annually, depending on newsworthy events.
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With the Spring 2009 issue, ARCUS changed the format of Witness the Arctic. To provide more frequent updates and reduce printing and mailing costs and associated environmental impacts, the newsletter is now distributed online in three or four shorter issues per year, depending on newsworthy events.
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Advanced Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (ACADIS), the NSF Data Management program for arctic sciences (see: NSF’s New Data Management System for Arctic Research Programs), is approaching its first anniversary of providing services for the arctic research community. This is a collaborative project between the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). ACADIS data experts have spent the year expanding existing data archive infrastructure and services to support all investigators funded through the Office of Polar Programs (OPP) Division of Arctic Sciences (ARC).
Accomplishments include:
- Ongoing support for all OPP/ARC investigators to meet their data management requirements through the availability of a Data Management Plan Template for researchers to use when completing NSF proposal documentation;
- Customized support to scientists preparing an effective data management strategy in their NSF proposals for field projects or individual investigations;
- Expansion of the ACADIS data repository to serve the diverse data from all ARC projects and individual investigators;
- Development and implementation of a data search and discovery portal for finding and accessing AON data;
- Provision of support for all NSF arctic investigators to submit their metadata and datasets to ACADIS;
- Formation of an ACADIS Data Advisory Committee (ADAC) made up of community investigators to provide guidance and oversight of ACADIS activities; and
- Implementation of an ADAC recommendation to define and develop a 'Showcase' project to harmonize arctic soil temperature and permafrost data as a demonstration of the value of attention to data formats and metadata standards as well as the value of ACADIS services.
Looking forward to Year 2, focus will shift to expanding system functionality to accommodate greater data diversity, offering Digital Object Identifier (DOI)-based data citations for data submitted to ACADIS, establishing interoperability with other arctic data archives, and incorporating an on-the-fly Excel to NetCDF data format conversion tool. ACADIS search and discovery capabilities in Year 2 will be expanded to include data from all NSF arctic projects and beyond to other selected archive sites housing complementary datasets. ACADIS will continue its strong support to the community for bringing NSF/ARC data and metadata into ACADIS and assisting with other data management support needs.
For further information about ACADIS, please go to: http://www.aoncadis.org or contact Mark Serreze (serreze [at] nsidc [dot] org) or Jim Moore (jmoore [at] ucar [dot] edu).