NCAR Research Data Archive logo

About the Research Data Archive

The Research Data Archive (RDA), managed by the Data Engineering and Curation Section (DECS) of the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at NSF NCAR, contains a large and diverse collection of meteorological and oceanographic observations, operational and reanalysis model outputs, integrated with NSF NCAR High Performance Compute resources to support atmospheric and geosciences research.

Mission Statement

The DECS mission is to support atmospheric and related sciences research by maintaining and developing the Research Data Archive, and reinforcing its utility with expert consulting. It is realized by:

  • Managing a heterogeneous archive constructed over a 40+ year time period
  • Supporting long-term preservation of irreplaceable data
  • Acquiring data that extends and stewards essential ongoing datasets
  • Expanding the RDA with new community reference datasets
  • Implementing evolved IT functionality to enhance user data discovery and access
  • Providing data management support to NCAR researchers

The DECS mission statement is motivated by the NCAR and NSF mission components.


CoreTrustSeal logo

The RDA is proud to be a CoreTrustSeal Certified Repository and a regular member of the World Data System. CoreTrustSeal is an international, community based, non-governmental, and non-profit organization promoting sustainable and trustworthhy data infrastructures. For transparency, CoreTrustSeal publishes a public version of each certified repository's application, including the RDA application.

People Behind the RDA

Chi-Fan Shih
chifan@ucar.edu
Bob Dattore
dattore@ucar.edu
Dave Stepaniak
davestep@ucar.edu
Riley Conroy
rpconroy@ucar.edu
Doug Schuster
schuster@ucar.edu
Thomas Cram
tcram@ucar.edu
Zaihua Ji
zji@ucar.edu