Advancing Climate Data Use by Leveraging the Synergy of the Fair Digital Object Standard and the InterPlanetary File System Protocol

Climate science relies heavily on the effective creation, management, sharing, and analysis of massive and diverse datasets. As the digital landscape evolves, there is a growing need to establish a framework that ensures FAIRness in handling climate science digital objects. In particular, the machine-to-machine actionability of digital objects will be a crucial step towards future AI-assisted workflows. Illustrated by a use case, this contribution proposes adopting the Fair Digital Object (FDO) standard in synergy with the emerging InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to address the challenges associated with the interdisciplinary reuse of climate model simulation outputs and observational data.

FDOs are encapsulations of data and their metadata, made accessible via persistent identifiers, ensuring that data and its context remain a complete unit as the FDO travels through cyberspace and time. They represent a paradigm shift in data management, emphasizing machine-actionability principles of FAIRness and the requirements for enabling cross-disciplinary research. The FDO concept can be applied to various digital objects, including data, documents, and software across different research disciplines and industry areas.

IPFS is a peer-to-peer network protocol that enables decentralized file storage and sharing by assigning each file a unique content identifier. This system facilitates efficient, tamper-resistant storage across a distributed network, inherently supporting immutability and version control. Employing IPFS as the access layer for FDOs adds scalability, security, and redundancy to data management frameworks, while FDOs themselves contribute a semantically structured approach to defining, accessing, and linking digital objects.

This work presents a prototypical implementation and highlights the immediate benefits of the described concept when applied to manage data derived from the ORCESTRA (Organized Convection and EarthCARE Studies over the Tropical Atlantic) campaign. The campaign, conducted in August and September 2024, involved gathering data from multiple measurement platforms, including satellite observations, airborne instruments, ground-based systems, and climate model data. From a data management perspective, this multi-sensor campaign offers a valuable opportunity to test and refine concepts for handling large, heterogeneous datasets. As part of this work, selected datasets from the campaign were ingested and transferred via IPFS and included in a public catalog adhering to the FDO standard.

In conclusion, IPFS and FDOs establish a decentralized, verifiable, and interoperable ecosystem for digital objects, effectively addressing the requirements for interdisciplinary scientific data sharing and management. Together, these innovative concepts can significantly enhance the reproducibility of research workflows and strengthen the consolidation of scientific results in the societally and economically critical domain of weather and climate research.