NSIDC Data Usage Feedback from the (Sea Ice) Modeling Community Todd Arbetter Research Scientist, NSIDC

Rationale Increasing/Improving User Access Goal: Increase data usage, where appropriate, by sea ice, regional, and global modelers Strategy: Two-way interaction with modelers Identify: Areas where NSIDC can improve user interface Outcome: A more modeler-friendly website that will lead to increased usage

Background Why won’t they just use our data? “For the modeler, acquiring and extracting data from outside sources is generally a difficulty, and then once we get the data, massaging it into a form we can use in our models can be another significant hurdle. I’m certain that there is a vast quantity of data ‘out there’ that would be very useful, but we have no idea on how to work with it.” -- user from NCAR

Objective Making life easier for modelers Informal, unscientific survey of a handful of regional and global modelers who already use NSIDC holdings: What data do they use? What data do they want? What obstacles do they face? What can NSIDC do to improve access?

Data Holdings What data do they use? Consensus among modelers for gridded data sets Sea ice area/extent Sea ice motion Some usage of non-gridded data Sea ice thickness (upper looking sonar) SHEBA observations Other fields not housed at NSIDC Atmospheric forcing

Increasing Inventory What data do they want? New/improved ice data Gridded ice thickness Ice mass balance Snow thickness, Snow water equivalent Atmosphere, surface, and upper ocean data Cloud fields Precipitation Turbulent and radiative fluxes Sea surface temperature Model users needs are governed by model configuration and capabilities. As models evolve, so will data requirements.

Access What obstacles do they face? User-end problems are strongly related to a lack of resources (time, people, tools) to acquire and process data. Difficulty in dealing with data formats and data grids was also mentioned. Other comments related to not being aware of existing, new, or improved datasets and not being certain of the data quality, errors, and limitations.

Suggestions (1) What can NSIDC do to improve access? Improvements to the NSIDC web interface Visibility/Organization of data products Multiple-indexed by field, source, region,… Recent additions page located on data front page Modeling basics page with links to widely-used fields (part of All About Sea Ice page?) Link to external datasets or data centers with relevant holdings (click-through)

Suggestions (2) What can NSIDC do to improve access? Specific ideas for data handling Quick-look widgets Downloadble visualization tools in common languages (IDL, Ferret, Matlab) Downloadable data-manipulation tools (interpolate/regrid, convert between formats) Provide some data on widely-used model grids (CCSM/CSIM, CICE, AMPS) NSF proposal by Parsons et al. is relevant and may address some of these points.

Summary Where do we go from here? Modeler feedback has provided suggestions falling into three categories: 1)Improved web interface 2)Improved data handling tools 3)Increased/improved data content NSIDC can continue to solicit feedback through existing methods and outreach ( e.g. CCSM Polar Working Group, March 2005 )