World Data Center for Climate – Repository for the Earth System Sciences

The World Data Center for Climate (WDCC) is a repository hosted by the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) in Hamburg, Germany. It provides access to and offers long-term archiving for data relevant for climate and Earth System research in a highly standardized manner following the FAIR principles. The repository is an accredited regular member of the World Data System (WDS) since 2003 and WDCC is certified as a Trustworthy Data Repository by CoreTrustSeal (https://www.coretrustseal.org).

WDCC services are aimed at both scientists who produce data (e.g. long-term archiving to fulfill the guidelines of good scientific practice) and scientists who re-use published data for new research. In Earth System Sciences often a big quantity of data is produced and needed for climate research. This is especially true for climate model output. To enable scientists to re-use data also across domains, it is essential that data is archived including rich metadata. Before data is published in WDCC, it undergoes multiple checks and curation. Recently WDCC has established its own standard for NetCDF file headers, so that only data fulfilling this standard are accepted for publication.

The WDCC minimal standard is based on CF metadata conventions, but goes beyond the requirements of most conventional CF checkers to ensure rich metadata in file headers. Requirements for the minimal standard have been published in the WDCC user guide to provide clear instructions for our users. A tool to check for WDCC minimal standard in NetCDF files has recently been released for internal use and is currently under development for public use as well. This will make it easier for data producers to check their data before submission to WDCC.

The overall goal of establishing the WDCC minimal standard is to keep and improve high metadata standards at WDCC, to ease the submission process as well as to improve re-usabilty of published data.