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The METAFOR project: preserving data through metadata standards for climate models and simulations

Callaghan, S. A., Treshansky, A., Moine, M., Guilyardi, E., Alias, A., Balaji, V., Bojariu, R., Cofino, A. S., Denvil, S., Elkington, M., Ford, R., Kolaninski, M., Lautenschlager, M., Lawrence, B. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9262-7860, Steenman-Clark, L. and Valcke, S. (2010) The METAFOR project: preserving data through metadata standards for climate models and simulations. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Digital Preservation Interoperability Framework Symposium, April 21 - 23 2010, Dresden, Germany, 6:1-6:8.

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Official URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2039263.2039269

Abstract/Summary

Climate modeling is a complex process, requiring accurate and complete metadata in order to identify, assess and use climate data stored in digital repositories. The preservation of such data is increasingly important given the development of ever-increasingly complex models to predict the effects of global climate change. The EU METAFOR project has developed a Common Information Model (CIM) to describe climate data and the models and modelling environments that produce this data. There is a wide degree of variability between different climate models and modelling groups. To accommodate this, the CIM has been designed to be highly generic and flexible, with extensibility built in. METAFOR describes the climate modelling process simply as "an activity undertaken using software on computers to produce data." This process has been described as separate UML packages (and, ultimately, XML schemas). This fairly generic structure canbe paired with more specific "controlled vocabularies" in order to restrict the range of valid CIM instances. The CIM will aid digital preservation of climate models as it will provide an accepted standard structure for the model metadata. Tools to write and manage CIM instances, and to allow convenient and powerful searches of CIM databases,. Are also under development. Community buy-in of the CIM has been achieved through a continual process of consultation with the climate modelling community, and through the METAFOR team’s development of a questionnaire that will be used to collect the metadata for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) model runs.

Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Refereed:No
Divisions:Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > NCAS
Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
ID Code:29545
Uncontrolled Keywords:climate modelling, metadata
Publisher:ACM
Publisher Statement:© ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 1st International Digital Preservation Interoperability Framework Symposium, 6:1-6:8. 2010} http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2039263.2039269

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