Cutting through climate data

Climate researchers establishing remote measurement stations to observe energy, carbon and water exchange measurements have historically tolerated a range of challenges.

Some of the problems facing the researchers at these locations were isolation, equipment failure and systems unable to keep up with advances in the science.

But scientists from Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science have overcome such diverse challenges and are now at the forefront of development of a coordinated network of measurement sites, known as 'OzFlux'.

OzFlux is a $2.3M initiative - part of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) - providing measurements of energy, carbon and water exchange between the Australian biosphere and the atmosphere above it.

The Monash researchers are also leading an important IT project that has standardised the data processing techniques used for OzFlux, resulting in improvements to final data quality and greater public accessibility to collected data.

Dr Peter Isaac and Associate Professor Jason Beringer have spent the last 12 months working in close collaboration with IT specialists from Monash University’s e-Research Centre, the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), and in consultation with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, developing the data pathway and web-based data portal that would process, archive and deliver ecosystem data from up to 20 sites.

“For example, in the past I would phone a scientist in Darwin and ask him to post me a CD with CO2 data from our savannah sites for my research,” Dr Isaac said.

This original system of physically collecting and posting data is all but obsolete.

With the new system the site scientist responsible for data collection and maintenance of the data remotely collects and processes the data and then uploads this to the central server for external users. The web portal has options to control user access rights, includes descriptive metadata information about precisely how the final data was collected and also lists all the associated research projects and national competitive grants of the site scientist.

The final solution has combined online and open source software solutions and applications from Dr Isaac’s own project on ‘quality control and data pre-processing’, using Python software.

Underpinning this IT project was the need for a more collaborative research environment to address global climate challenges.