Stewardship Best Practices for Improved Discovery and Reuse of Heterogeneous and Cross-Disciplinary Earth System Data

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ADMG STEWARDSHIP BEST PRACTICES
The following high-level recommended practices apply to all types of data and information from Earth science airborne and field campaigns that NASA supportes or participates in: Communicate clearly and effectively with campaign data producers and users across multiple disciplines. Specifically, it is recommended to: Interact with and support the science team during the campaign to gain better understanding of campaign information, Use and encourage campaign scientists' use of controlled vocabularies as appropriate, Develop a DAAC* data management plan to clearly communicate how the DAAC will care for the data products after they are obtained from the data producers, Ensure important contextual information is obtained from the science team before team members move on to other campaign efforts or field archives are removed.
Maintain a comprehensive and consistent set of high-quality information and documentation for every campaign. Specifically, it is recommended to: Be consistent in the organization of data and information across campaigns, Establish a discoverable and consistent campaign "landing page", Ensure the DAAC landing page content is machine accessible.
Actively manage NASA campaign data and information as a valuable agency asset. Specifically, it is recommended to: Adhere to NASA standards and conventions in data stewardship, Ensure and maintain quality of ingested and released data and information, Ensure cross-connection of information and use of networking tools to improve information access and education for user communities.
Additional complementary, domain specific documents are under development for specific types of the airborne and field campaign data; these include but are not limited to: Atmospheric chemistry data, Ground and airborne radar and lidar data, Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) data.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
AIRBORNE AND FIELD CAMPAIGN DATA PRODUCTS ARE highly heterogeneous and cross-disciplinary, making it extremely challenging to manage and hard to find.

THE SOLUTION TO THE CHALLENGE IS
to ensure and improve consistency in documenting contextual information, provide a designated catalogue, and promote scientific data stewardship.

NASA IS ADDRESSING THIS CHALLENGE BY
Establishing the NASA Airborne Data Management Group (ADMG) to curate comprehensive, consistent, high-quality contextual information that specifically pertains to the airborne and field campaign data, Releasing a new catalog for improved airborne and field campaign data discovery -Catalog of Archived Suborbital Earth Science Investigations (CASEI) that builds on the well-curated information, and, Preparing a series of stewardship best practices documents to inform DAACs on ways to effectively manage and steward NASA campaign data.

CURRENT STEWARDSHIP STATUS OF NASA AIRBORNE CAMPAIGN DATA
NASA has carried out many airborne and field campaigns, across the spectrum of the Earth ecosystem, including cloud, carbon and aerosols, and the cryosphere. Research and applications based on the campaign data are cross-disciplinary, including air quality, Monsoon processes, Arctic ice and Greenland glacier melting.
As of November 2021, there are 153 known NASA airborne and field campaigns with measurements taken from many different instruments on a variety of platforms with various spatial and temporal coverages. Platforms include aircrafts, water-based platforms, and mobile/stationary land-based platforms. Among those known campaigns, ADMG has curated and published 62 to CASEI, along with 378 commonly used instruments on 67 platforms. More are in progress and will be published to CASEI when they are ready.