ORCID

0000-0001-6437-5977 (Hertzberg)

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2019

DOI

10.1029/2019pa003632

Publication Title

Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology

Volume

34

Issue

10

Pages

1570-1596

Abstract

The progress of science is tied to the standardization of measurements, instruments, and data. This is especially true in the Big Data age, where analyzing large data volumes critically hinges on the data being standardized. Accordingly, the lack of community-sanctioned data standards in paleoclimatology has largely precluded the benefits of Big Data advances in the field. Building upon recent efforts to standardize the format and terminology of paleoclimate data, this article describes the Paleoclimate Community reporTing Standard (PaCTS), a crowdsourced reporting standard for such data. PaCTS captures which information should be included when reporting paleoclimate data, with the goal of maximizing the reuse value of paleoclimate data sets, particularly for synthesis work and comparison to climate model simulations. Initiated by the LinkedEarth project, the process to elicit a reporting standard involved an international workshop in 2016, various forms of digital community engagement over the next few years, and grassroots working groups. Participants in this process identified important properties across paleoclimate archives, in addition to the reporting of uncertainties and chronologies; they also identified archive-specific properties and distinguished reporting standards for new versus legacy data sets. This work shows that at least 135 respondents overwhelmingly support a drastic increase in the amount of metadata accompanying paleoclimate data sets. Since such goals are at odds with present practices, we discuss a transparent path toward implementing or revising these recommendations in the near future, using both bottom-up and top-down approaches.

Rights

©2019. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.

"AGU allows authors to deposit their journal articles if the version is the final published citable version of record, the AGU copyright statement is clearly visible on the posting, and the posting is made 6 months after official publication by the AGU."

Data Availability

Article states: "Code and data to reproduce the figures of this article are available on GitHub and released on Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.3165019). Definition of properties and recommendations are summarized here: http://wiki.linked.earth/PaCTS_v1.0."

Link to referenced Zenodo DOI is https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3165019

Original Publication Citation

Khider, D., Emile-Geay, J., McKay, N. P., Gil, Y., Garijo, D., Ratnakar, V., . . . Zhou, Y. (2019). Pacts 1.0: A crowdsourced reporting standard for paleoclimate data. Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, 34(10), 1570-1596. doi:10.1029/2019pa003632

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