CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment accomplishments

Research Data Archive (RDA) accomplishments

The most significant recent addition to the Research Data Archive (http://dss.ucar.edu/) illustrates the growing success in providing access to climate data. This featured example comes from a partnership with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to produce and archive the products of the ECMWF 40-year reanalysis (ERA-40). A key aspect of this partnership has been the archival of both observations and reanalyzed data from ERA-40, and these products are important for many types of research (see The ERA-40 Archive at NCAR).

Data access to ERA-40 continues to grow. Data distribution has two channels: the NCAR MSS and online data service via the internet. ERA-40 users have access to all of the regular ERA-40 products from ECMWF plus analyses computed by SCD, e.g. a T85-resolution dataset to facilitate comparisons of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) output with ERA-40.

The table below is a 9-month summary of unique users, number of files, and total data amount delivered for the MSS and network. More than 100 users have received over 25 TB of data during this period.