The challenging research data management support in the interdisciplinary cluster of excellence CliCCS

In 2019 the Universität Hamburg was awarded funding for 4 clusters of excellence in the Excellence Strategy of the Federal and State Governments. One of these clusters funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) is “CliCCS – Climate, Climatic Change, and Society”. The scientific objectives of CliCCS are achieved within three intertwined research themes, on the Sensitivity and Variability in the Climate System, Climate-Related Dynamics of Social Systems, and Sustainable Adaption Scenarios. Each theme is structured into multiple projects addressing sub-objectives of each theme. More than 200 researchers the Hamburg University, but also other connected research centers and partner institutions  are involved and almost all of them are using but mainly produce new data.

Research data is produced with great effort and is therefore one of the valuable assets of scientific institutions. It is part of good scientific practice to make research data freely accessible and available in the long term as a transparent basis for scientific statements.

Within the interdisciplinary cluster of excellence CliCCS, the type of research data is very different. The data range from results from physically dynamic ocean and atmosphere models, to measurement data in the coastal area, to survey and interview data in the field of sociology. 

The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) is taking care on the Research Data Management and supports the researchers in creating data management plans, keeping naming conventions or simply finding the optimal repository to publish the data. The goal is to store and long-term archiving of the data, but also to ensure the quality of the data and thus to facilitate potential reuse.