ORCESTRAting IPFS STAC and FDO: An approach to enhance the FAIRness and global availability of campaign data

During field campaigns, unique and often irreplaceable datasets essential for advancing Earth system science are collected. Experience from previous campaigns has shown that the long-term scientific value of such data critically depends on proper data management, because data that are difficult to find or access are often underused, despite their high scientific value.

For the ORCESTRA campaign, these experiences informed the design of a data infrastructure that prioritizes global visibility, standardized metadata, and resilient access from the beginning. ORCESTRA datasets are stored and made available using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), with the central data node hosted at the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ), which ensures 24/7 operational stability. The approach using IPFS improves data redundancy and resilience, addressing common risks identified in earlier campaigns where data availability depended on single hosting locations.

To increase and ensure findability and reuse of ORCESTRA campaign data, we implemented a dynamic catalog following the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification. The catalog feeds a public browser (https://orcestra.cloud.dkrz.de/), enabling intuitive exploration and direct access to datasets. Currently, data from the PERCUSION, MAESTRO, BOW-TIE sub-campaigns and the Barbados Cloud Observatory (BCO) are available. Further datasets are planned to complement this collection in the near future. Further, we configure the ORCESTRA STAC catalog according to the FAIR Digital Object
(FDO) specifications to enable real interdisciplinary findabiliy and reusability.

In our contribution, we will dive into the technical details of our implementation as well as emphasise that providing heterogenous field campaign data via dynamic STAC catalogs configure as FDOs enables interoperability with existing and emerging data spaces, e.g. the Destination Earth Data Lake or upcoming federated data infrastructure focused on climate science, e.g. FUTURA. In summary this approach reflects lessons learned from earlier campaigns and supports sustainable, federated data sharing to maximize scientific reuse.