Capturing and sharing our collective expertise on climate data: the CHARMe project

For users of climate services, the ability to quickly determine the datasets that best fit one's needs would be invaluable. The volume, variety and complexity of climate data makes this judgment difficult. The ambition of CHARMe ("Characterization of metadata to enable high-quality climate services") is to give a wider interdisciplinary community access to a range of supporting information, such as journal articles, technical reports or feedback on previous applications of the data. The capture and discovery of this "commentary" information, often created by data users rather than data providers, and currently not linked to the data themselves, has not been significantly addressed previously. CHARMe applies the principles of Linked Data and open web standards to associate, record, search and publish user-derived annotations in a way that can be read both by users and automated systems. Tools have been developed within the CHARMe project that enable annotation capability for data delivery systems already in wide use for discovering climate data. In addition, the project has developed advanced tools for exploring data and commentary in innovative ways, including an interactive data explorer and comparator ("CHARMe Maps") and a tool for correlating climate time series with external "significant events" (e.g. instrument failures or large volcanic eruptions) that affect the data quality. Although the project focuses on climate science, the concepts are general and could be applied to other fields. All CHARMe system software is open-source, released under a liberal licence, permitting future projects to re-use the source code as they wish

Data Assimilation Enhancements to Air Force Weathers Land Information System

The United States Air Force (USAF) has a proud and storied tradition of enabling significant advancements in the area of characterizing and modeling land state information. 557th Weather Wing (557 WW; DoDs Executive Agent for Land Information) provides routine geospatial intelligence information to warfighters, planners, and decision makers at all echelons and services of the U.S. military, government and intelligence community. 557 WW and its predecessors have been home to the DoDs only operational regional and global land data analysis systems since January 1958. As a trusted partner since 2005, Air Force Weather (AFW) has relied on the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA/GSFC to lead the interagency scientific collaboration known as the Land Information System (LIS). LIS is an advanced software framework for high performance land surface modeling and data assimilation of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) information

Mean states and variability of some aspects of the hydrological cycle.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-114).by Cecelia DeLuca.M.S

¡Yo luché!: Uncovering and Interrupting Silencing in an Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Community

The purpose of this applied project is to uncover and interrupt the silencing of memories through the production of public narratives, specifically, the documentation of heritage of members of an indigenous and Afro-descendant community in Waspán, Nicaragua. The project is informed by interviews with seven women ex-combatants in the Contra War (1980-1990). Oral histories, transcribed interviews, and field notes are the source for the content of a book of heritage stories that I produced as one output about the former combatants utilizing their own words. In this thesis, I argue that the values of the “conquering” group of Nicaragua (i.e. the Sandinistas, and specifically the upper class male leadership) are reproduced through the dominant national narratives, which also serve to silence other voices such as the Afro-descendant and indigenous populations, the former Contra Combatants, and the women within the Miskitu ethnic group. I further argue that the ways in which silences are reproduced can be interrupted through this oral history project, which supports the production of alternative narratives that challenge dominant narratives and provide a way for historically silenced groups to “voice” and memorialize their stories. This research project is an effort to support a community in its attempts to give “voice” to narratives that have been “silenced” in official national discourses found in museums, monuments, heritage sites and educational curriculum

\u3cem\u3eİYo luché!\u3c/em\u3e: Uncovering and Interrupting Silencing in an Indigenous and Afro-descendant Community

The purpose of this applied project is to uncover and interrupt the silencing of memories through the production of public narratives, specifically, the documentation of heritage of members of an indigenous and Afro-descendant community in Waspán, Nicaragua. The project is informed by interviews with seven women ex-combatants in the Contra War (1980-1990). Oral histories, transcribed interviews, and field notes are the source for the content of a book of heritage stories that I produced as one output about the former combatants utilizing their own words. In this thesis, I argue that the values of the “conquering” group of Nicaragua (i.e. the Sandinistas, and specifically the upper class male leadership) are reproduced through the dominant national narratives, which also serve to silence other voices such as the Afro-descendant and indigenous populations, the former Contra Combatants, and the women within the Miskitu ethnic group. I further argue that the ways in which silences are reproduced can be interrupted through this oral history project, which supports the production of alternative narratives that challenge dominant narratives and provide a way for historically silenced groups to “voice” and memorialize their stories. This research project is an effort to support a community in its attempts to give “voice” to narratives that have been “silenced” in official national discourses found in museums, monuments, heritage sites and educational curriculum

Documenting Climate Models and Their Simulations

International audienceThe results of climate models are of increasing and widespread importance. No longer is climate model output of sole interest to climate scientists and researchers in the climate change impacts and adaptation fields. Now nonspecialists such as government officials, policy makers, and the general public all have an increasing need to access climate model output and understand its implications. For this host of users, accurate and complete metadata (i.e., information about how and why the data were produced) is required to document the climate modeling results. Here we describe a pilot community initiative to collect and make available documentation of climate models and their simulations. In an initial application, a metadata repository is being established to provide information of this kind for a major internationally coordinated modeling activity known as CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5). It is expected that for a wide range of stakeholders, this and similar community-managed metadata repositories will spur development of analysis tools that facilitate discovery and exploitation of Earth system simulations