Guidelines to create a climate data product

UNDER DEVELOPMENT

So far, the guidelines have focused on creating, managing, and publishing climate research data with a climate science researcher as end-user. However, climate data is often used in other research fields, government initiatives and by private stakeholders for a variety of applications.
The process of adapting and packaging climate data so that it will be of use to a wider audience, with different backgrounds and/or for different purposes is more complex than simply sharing data with other climate researchers. There are research projects that contributed to putting together climate data products, e.g., agencies such as CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology do this on a regular basis; However, there’s no best-practice documentation available.

This guideline outlines the extra steps to consider when creating a climate data product that is fit to be distributed. It is essential to provide enough documentation and quality control so that a non-expert audience can use the data correctly and trust can be built and maintained in the product. It is also important to offer a product in the correct format and accessible to the targeted users.

This is a new guideline and we welcome input and contributions from anyone who is interested and/or has experience in providing climate data products.

Potential outline

Here is list of steps to consider:

• Preprocessing

  • Data Collection and Preprocessing

  • Data Bias Correction

  • Quality Control and Validation

• Formatting

  • Spatial and Temporal Subset

  • Spatial Interpolation

  • Data Aggregation and Averaging

  • Convert to appropriate format

• Create User-Friendly Climate Products

  • User-centric documentation

  • Data Visualization and Analysis

• Data Distribution and Sharing

  • Select appropriate platform/s

  • Continual Update and Improvement

  • Copyright, license, disclaimer and other terms of use