STFC

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is keeping the UK at the forefront of international science and tackling some of the most significant challenges facing society such as meeting our future energy needs, monitoring and understanding climate change, and global security. The Council has a broad science portfolio and works with the academic and industrial communities to share its expertise in materials science, space and ground-based astronomy technologies, laser science, microelectronics, wafer scale manufacturing, particle and nuclear physics, alternative energy production, radio communications and radar.

STFC is one of seven publicly-funded Research Councils. It is an independent, non-departmental public body of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

As part of STFC, the Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA) serves the environmental science community through four data centres and involvement in a host of projects. Through these services we aim to further environmental data archival practices and develop new web technologies to bring increased usability to the data in our archives.
CEDA is responsible for the running of the following data centres:

The British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC): NERC's designated data centre for the UK atmospheric science community, covering climate, composition, observations and NWP data.
UK Solar System Data Centre: The UK Solar System Data Centre, co-funded by STFC and NERC, curates and provides access to archives of data from the upper atmosphere, ionosphere and Earth's solar environment.
NERC Earth Observation Data Centre: The NEODC is NERC's designated data centre for Earth Observation data and is part of NERC's National Centre for Earth Observation. The NEODC is now known as the CEMS-Academic archive.
IPCC Data Distribution Centre: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) DDC provides climate, socio-economic and environmental data, both from the past and also in scenarios projected into the future. Technical guidelines on the selection and use of different types of data and scenarios in research and assessment are also provided.

STFC CEDA has many years of experience in the management of atmospheric, and other, scientific data sets. We have been strongly involved in the development of national and international standards on metadata and data formatting: including the INSPIRE data specifications and the CF-netCDF Standard Name vocabulary. With multi-petabyte data holdings STFC CEDA is also equipped to support the requirements of big data projects such as EUSTACE. The JASMIN/CEMS platform provides the infrastructure to deliver large collaborative disks and batch processing systems to the project team. The STFC CEDA data centres are tasked with curation of data sets and dissemination into the medium and long-term.

STFC co-leads WP4 on Outreach and Dissemination (with KNMI), focussing in particular on data management aspects.

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