Traceable Data and a Transparent Process: Experiences from the Sustained National Climate Assessment

Abstract:

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is conducting a sustained National Climate Assessment (NCA) process that includes a substantial emphasis on providing traceable evidence for climate science. The delivery of the 2014 NCA marked a new way of providing transparency, documenting metadata, and improving user access via the Global Change Information System. Ultimately, these efforts to provide actionable information, data, and tools about climate change impacts and vulnerability will lead to increased resilience of our communities. Of course, implementing new approaches brings new challenges as well as opportunities. Complete transparency is in many ways a change from the established way of publishing science, and requires authors and data providers to document details with a depth and precision that many are unused to. The depth of metadata needed to provide a user with full traceability of the conclusions – i.e., from a published paper to all of its underlying datasets, their observational instruments, resulting model output, related figures – will need to be built over time. The Program’s efforts to build GCIS and connections to other climate data, information, and tools will also assist coordination among Federal agencies, which manage their data resources individually and maintain their own data policies. Continued collaboration will identify paths forward that meet the collective need without constraining agencies' abilities to meet their own needs and those of their stakeholders.