Note: This page was originally sourced from our Blogger page: http://ncarrda.blogspot.com/2015/10/rda-chosen-for-new-wcrp-reanalysis.html

Excerpt from CISL News:

Masatomo Fujiwara of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan leads a program to understand differences between the world’s leading global atmospheric reanalysis datasets, and his team determined that almost all of the datasets for this intercomparison project are available in CISL’s Research Data Archive (RDA). The SPARC Reanalysis Intercomparison Project (S-RIP) is coordinated by one of the core projects of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), named Stratosphere-troposphere Processes And their Role in Climate (SPARC).

“Reanalysis datasets with varied data formats and different access protocols are archived at various reanalysis centers around the world, and some older reanalysis datasets are no longer archived at some centers,” explains project lead Masatomo Fujiwara. “The NCAR RDA houses key climate datasets and is extremely useful for worldwide data users to obtain both older and newer reanalysis datasets.”

The S-RIP project is comparing reanalysis data sets, investigating the causes of differences among reanalyses, helping researchers use reanalysis products in scientific studies, and working to improve future reanalysis products by collaborating with reanalysis centers. S-RIP collaborators have selected the RDA as the primary data source for this project: of the 12 reanalysis datasets being used, researchers are directed to the RDA for 11 of them.

Read the rest of the article.

While there are many places that archive weather and climate data, the variety of data and the availability of older data makes RDA unique.