Regarding the management of environment and climate data, ECDS’ general advice is to build on standards and formats already in use by the respective communities as far as possible. This will not only prevent you from reinventing the wheel (which saves time and money) but also help to prevent the generation of a multitude of different individual solutions to often very similar problems (which in turn might make it difficult for others to use and benefit from your data).
At this site we have started to compile information on metadata conventions, data formats and visualization, processing and conversion tools. This below list is just a start and is expected to grow successively. Please let us know if your or your community’s metadata convention, data management best practices, visualization, processing or conversion tool are missing and we will add it to the list.
Metadata
Metadata are used to describe a dataset and to provide information about What-Where-When-Who-How. The ECDS metadata profile is described in detail in the ECDS user manual.
Specific communities may have different requirements on how datasets should be described. In the climate community, e.g., huge efforts have been committed to the creation of metadata conventions, in particular with regard to requirements from coordinated global and regional climate model experiments for the IPCC.
CF metadata
Metafor
Data formats
A lot of data formats are in use by different communities. In the meteorological, oceanography and climate communities and, in particular the modelling communities, popular formats include:
Grib
NetCDF, Home
NetCDF Documentation
NetCDF Integrated Data Viewer
Hdf
Many users in the environment and climate domain use GIS-applications for the visualization or analysis of data. An extensive list of popular raster and vector GIS-formats can be found at:
GIS-formats
OGC-standards for geospatial and location based services
Data organization, mangagement and distribution
Data processing, conversion and/or visualization
Useful tools for working with Grib and/or netcdf include, e.g.:
CDO Climate Data Operators
NCO operators
Grads
For GIS-formats there is a variety of commercial and non-commercial tools available. The latter includes both viewers, simpler tools for analysis as well as fully fledged GIS-applications, e.g.:
GRASS-GIS
OpenEV
QGIS
Tools for the conversion of GIS-formats (raster and vector) can be found at, e.g.:
GDAL
OGR