1. The British Atmospheric Data Centre Alison Pamment Kevin Marsh

3. Data Provision to Non-Modellers More than half the BADC users are not atmospheric scientists For example, the LINK project provides data to the climate impacts community –Currently 81 registered users worldwide from a variety of backgrounds: climate change research, soil science, social sciences, tourism.

4. The LINK project DEFRA funded project to make Hadley Centre Climate Model output available to the research community Begun in 1991 by CRU; BADC involved since 2002. Variety of model versions: HadAM3, HadCM2, HadCM3, HadRM2, HadRM3, HadGEM1. Variety of experiments: IPCC ghg scenarios, “All forcings”.

5. The LINK dataset LINK now has almost 900GB of data in 7million files and is the 12 th largest dataset at the BADC. Model output is held at daily, monthly and seasonal intervals PP and ascii formats Many of the users are not experts in using either of these data formats

6. Ascii File Example

7. Technical Issues Original CRU archive extracted data for a limited list of model variables –Users inevitably ask for a variable which isn’t in the list ASCII files did not all have same format –Format specifiers in some files were found to be incorrect

8. User Requests (1) “How do I read these files? I’m not a programmer” “Help! The ascii data files you created for me are too large for Excel…” “Can you give me the temperature data for 51N, 4.1W, with the data in order time,lat,lon,temp?” “Why is the ascii hadrm3 file for ‘prec’ missing?”

9. Model configurations Global – mostly requested by attribution/Climate change researchers Regional – Climate change impacts research Regional model difficult for non-experts as data are on “rotated pole” grid. Users of CRU ascii RM files have to use a lookup table to locate cells of interest in “real” lat-lon co-ordinates

10. Regional Model Area

12. User requests (2) Users have asked for data for several cells, from several runs, for several decades – time consuming. Users ask for scientific guidance on most appropriate model runs to use for their research – queries are passed on. “You have data for SRESA2a but not SRESA2b/c –where is it?”

13. User requests (3) “I am looking for climate data projections from HADCM2 for the period 1994-2099 for study area of Eastern Colorado in USA, I need help how to find it online and how to extract in a form usable to me.”

14. Issues Arising Need a tool for rotating regional model data back to standard lat-lon co-ordinates Handling user requests can be very time consuming Important to cater for the needs of users who have neither scientific nor technical expertise