The establishment of the World Data Center-A (WDC-A) for Paleoclimatology was announced recently at a WDC meeting in Beijing, following recommendations by the U.S. Committee on Geophysical Data, and with the endorsement of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) and the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP). With this announcement, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) Paleoclimatology Program has been expanded in scope to serve as a coordination center for paleoenvironmental data management activities needed by the international research community. An immediate goal of the WDC-A for Paleoclimatology in Boulder is to join IGBP Past Global Changes (PAGES) in coordinating the design and implementation of a global, sciencedriven data management system that integrates all types of paleoenvironmental data needed by the international global change community to identify the patterns and the causes of past climatic and environmental change. Data are the basic material for this research and must be integrated into a form that can be easily accessed and used by all who need them.
The Paleoclimatology Program is working closely with the PAGES Core Project Office in Bern, Switzerland, as well as the IGBP-Data and Information System (DIS) to develop an easily accessible international data system for the acquisition, management, and distribution of paleoenvironmental data. These data include primary data (e.g., raw tree-ring measurements, fossil counts, isotopic measurements); secondary data developed from the raw data (e.g., tree-ring chronologies, fossil percentages, isotopic ratios as a function of age); and tertiary information inferred from the primary and secondary data (e.g., paleoclimate estimates, sea-surface temperature or paleovegetation reconstructions). Also archived are some modern calibration data needed to convert primary and secondary data into quantitative estimates of past climate, ocean, or biosphere conditions; time series of hypothesized climate forcing (e.g., solar, volcanic, trace-gas, or astronomical changes); climate boundary conditions through time (e.g., ice extent and height, land surface characteristics); and output from atmosphere, ocean, and biosphere models.
On the national front, paleoclimatic data management efforts between NOAA, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) are being coordinated so that all data generated with U.S. federal assistance can be placed in the public domain quickly and in a form that is easy to share. The program actively encourages formal efforts to coordinate with specific proxy data communities to build new or expanded databases, including those for fossil pollen data, packrat midden data, plant macrofossil data, ice-core data, coral data, tree-ring data, paleosol data, paleovegetation data, past sea-surface data, loess data, lake level data, and climate model boundary conditions and simulations.
WDC-A and PAGES efforts also serve to provide the long records of past environmental change that are needed to separate natural from human induced (i.e., greenhouse) climatic change. Another important application of paleoenvironmental data is in the area of model development and validation. The paleoclimatic record is integral to understanding the mechanisms of climatic change. This understanding must be built into predictive models. Furthermore, a critical test of the ability of these models to simulate realistic change is to attempt to simulate past change. Toward this end, a large international effort has been established to compare the ability of 12 major climate models (GCMs) to simulate known climatic conditions at selected times in the past. The NATO-sponsored Paleoclimate Model Intercomparison Project (PMIP) has recently designated the Paleoclimatology Program to archive and distribute digital boundary conditions files (e.g., sea surface temperatures, terrestrial ice sheet height and extent, land surface properties) for GCM simulations of 6000 and 18,000 yr B.P. The data center also will work closely with PMIP to provide paleoclimate estimates that can be used in assessing the simulations.
The World Data Center-A contains an ever-growing collection of paleoclimate datasets. The goal in archiving these datasets is to make them easily available to the international community. The WDC-A is working to promote data exchange and sharing at the international level and can provide the assistance to make data sharing easy. Within the U.S., most funding agencies (e.g., NOAA, NSF, USGS) already require that research results (data) be made available to the public within a reasonable period of time. The list of paleoclimate datasets previously archived includes the International Tree-Ring Databank (ITRDB), western North American climate reconstructions, the CLIMAP data, the SPECMAP Archive #1, orbital variations and insolation data, select lake varve sediment data, ice core data, fossil planktonic foraminifera abundances, and marine carbonate stratigraphies. Recent updates have been received by the WDC-A to the ITRDB, to the orbital forcing and insolation dataset, and to the Quelccaya Ice Cap data. Newly contributed datasets include: the COHMAP eastern North America fossil pollen data; SPECMAP Archive #2; the Vostok Ice Core carbon dioxide, methane, dust, and temperature reconstructions; selected time series from the Bradley and Jones book "Climate Since A.D. 1500"; Russian fossil planktonic foraminifera abundances; high resolution ENSO coral records; the Barbados sea level record; and the Barbados U/Th-14C calibration data. On the horizon, the WDC-A already has commitments to receive additional paleoclimate datasets including: western North America fossil packrat midden pollen and macrofossil data; the Oxford/COHMAP lake level database; terrestrial ice sheet extent (size and height) and shorelines at the last glacial maximum; and NASA/GISS GCM simulations for 6K and 18K. Workshops and data cooperatives have been funded by NOAA to help focus the international scientific community on compiling other important paleoenvironmental datasets including high resolution coral records, global ice core data, North American macrofossil data, paleolimnological data, information on the last interglacial in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, global vegetation at the last glacial maximum, and late Pleistocene paleosols.
The goal of the Paleoclimatology Program is to distribute data in easy-access formats at a minimal cost. The center remains committed to ensuring that data are available to all interested users and therefore will continue to distribute data in ASCII format on diskettes for DOS, UNIX, and Macintosh machines at the cost of reproduction and distribution. An effort will continue to be made to try to accept contributions of digital paleoenvironmental data in any logical file format from Macintosh, DOS, or UNIX machines. Data on magnetic media or over FTP/INTERNET are acceptable. Preferred formats for contributing data to the WDC-A are: 1) standard ITRDB ("Tucson format") for tree ring data, 2) Tilia Graph for pollen data, 3) CLIMAP structured ASCII files for deep sea fauna, 4) tab or space delimited ASCII, 5) commercial spreadsheets (e.g., LOTUS, EXCEL, with complete documentation). The WDC-A for Paleoclimatology will try hard to make data submission easy. The WDC-A solicits contributions of all paleoenvironmental datasets for archiving and distribution and welcomes any suggestions on how to make the international sharing of paleoclimate data easier.
The Paleoclimatology Program is also in the process of developing a data access software, PaleoVu, to provide users with a comprehensive browse and visualization of all archived paleoclimate datasets. PaleoVu is a graphical tool to display and access data on a variety of different platforms, and is near completion for Microsoft Windows, with versions soon to follow for the Macintosh and OPEN LOOK for the X Window System (Sun SPARC Stations). PaleoVu will display data geographically as maps of site locations and/or mapped reconstructions of paleoenvironmental conditions for select time intervals. The user will be able to select data through a variety of filters as a function of data type, region, or temporal coverage, preview data as graphs, and then extract data for export in user-prescribed formats. A prototype of PaleoVu will be available in 1993.
A major advance in data accessibility has been the establishment of an ANONYMOUS FTP / INTERNET server that can be used to obtain all datasets free of charge. Data distribution utilizing Internet or other linked wide area networks permit users to browse and download data archived by the NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program / World Data Center-A (WDC-A) for Paleoclimatology.
To LOGON: FTP NGDC1.NGDC.NOAA.GOV -or-
FTP 192.149.148.121
Enter anonymous as your login name,
and your e-mail address as password
You should now see an FTP> prompt
Sample commands:
FTP> cd paleo
(change to /paleo directory)
FTP> ls
(display data file list on screen)
FTP> cd climap18
(change to the CLIMAP 18,000 BP data directory)
FTP> get climap18.readme
(copy readme file to your computer)
FTP> mget sst*
(copy all SST files to your computer)
FTP> cd
(change back to the 'root' directory)
FTP> cd pub
(change to the public directory)
FTP> put mydata
(send to NGDC your file "mydata")
FTP> quit
(end FTP session)
For information on the program or to be added to the mailing list contact Mrs. Mildred England, NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Paleoclimatology Program/World Data Center-A for Paleoclimatology, 325 Broadway, E/GC Boulder, CO 80303 USA. [Telephone: (303) 497-6227; E-mail: mke@mail.ngdc.noaa.gov]