25 years of the IPCC Data Distribution Centre at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ)

The Data Distribution Centre (DDC) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2022. DKRZ is the last remaining founding member among the DDC Partners. The contribution looks back on the past 25 years of the DDC at DKRZ from its establishment to the present. It shows which the milestones have been introduced in the areas of data management and data standardization, e.g. 

• the NetCDF/CF data standard,
• the DataCite data DOI assignment enabling data citation,  
• the data preservation and stewardship standards of the World Data System (WDS), 
• the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) as data infrastructure standard, or 
• the IPCC FAIR Guidelines for the current 6th Assessment Report (AR6). 

In addition to the continuous effort to adopt new standards and curate the data holdings, current challenges - technical and organizational - and possible future directions are discussed. The most difficult of the challenges remains the long-term strategy for sustainable DDC services as a part of an increasingly interoperable data service environment, which is technically described in the FAIR digital object framework and which is contentwise guided by the UN Sustainable Development Goal 13 on climate action. 

(http://ipcc-data.org; http://ipcc.wdc-climate.de)