The British Atmospheric Data Centre

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• The British Atmospheric Data Centre
• Alison Pamment
• Kevin Marsh

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Data Provision to Non-Modellers

• More than half the BADC users are not atmospheric
  scientists
• For example, the LINK project provides data to
  the climate impacts community
• Currently 81 registered users worldwide from a
  variety of backgrounds climate change research,
  soil science, social sciences, tourism.

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The LINK project

• DEFRA funded project to make Hadley Centre
  Climate Model output available to the research
  community
• Begun in 1991 by CRU BADC involved since 2002.
• Variety of model versions HadAM3, HadCM2,
  HadCM3, HadRM2, HadRM3, HadGEM1.
• Variety of experiments IPCC ghg scenarios, All
  forcings.

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The LINK dataset

• LINK now has almost 900GB of data in 7million
  files and is the 12th largest dataset at the
  BADC.
• Model output is held at daily, monthly and
  seasonal intervals
• PP and ascii formats
• Many of the users are not experts in using either
  of these data formats

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Ascii File Example
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Technical Issues

• Original CRU archive extracted data for a limited
  list of model variables
• Users inevitably ask for a variable which isnt
  in the list
• ASCII files did not all have same format
• Format specifiers in some files were found to be
  incorrect

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User Requests (1)

• How do I read these files? Im not a programmer
• Help! The ascii data files you created for me
  are too large for Excel
• Can you give me the temperature data for 51N,
  4.1W, with the data in order time,lat,lon,temp?
• Why is the ascii hadrm3 file for prec missing?

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Model configurations

• Global mostly requested by attribution/Climate
  change researchers
• Regional Climate change impacts research
• Regional model difficult for non-experts as data
  are on rotated pole grid.
• Users of CRU ascii RM files have to use a lookup
  table to locate cells of interest in real
  lat-lon co-ordinates

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Regional Model Area
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User requests (2)

• Users have asked for data for several cells, from
  several runs, for several decades time
  consuming.
• Users ask for scientific guidance on most
  appropriate model runs to use for their research
  queries are passed on.
• You have data for SRESA2a but not SRESA2b/c
  where is it?

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User requests (3)

• I am looking for climate data projections from
  HADCM2 for the period 1994-2099 for study area of
  Eastern Colorado in USA, I need help how to find
  it online and how to extract in a form usable to
  me.

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Issues Arising

• Need a tool for rotating regional model data back
  to standard lat-lon co-ordinates
• Handling user requests can be very time consuming
• Important to cater for the needs of users who
  have neither scientific nor technical expertise