input4MIPs Controlled Vocabularies (CVs)

THIS REPOSITORY IS CURRENTLY UNDER ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT

Controlled Vocabularies (CVs) for use in input4MIPs. Full documentation can be found at: input4mips-controlled-vocabularies-cvs.readthedocs.io.

For further information regarding forcing dataset development for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) activities, please see the CMIP Forcing Task Team homepage.

For different, pre-prepared views of the database, see database views.

Usage

For information about how to use this repository, see usage as a data user and usage as a data producer.

Repository overview

The repository captures two key pieces of information.

Controlled vocabularies

The first is the controlled vocabularies (CVs) used within the input4MIPs project. The CVs define the allowed terms which can be used for various pieces of metadata. The precise rules are still somewhat fuzzy and these CVs should be considered a work in progress, however they do provide much more structure than nothing. These live in the CVs directory.

These CVs are specific to the input4MIPs project. They supplement the 'global' CVs, which can be found in the MIP CMOR tables repository. As much as possible, we rely on the 'global' CVs and attempt to avoid duplicating information. However, the 'global' CVs are currently under heavy development, so there is some duplication at the moment. We hope to reduce this over time. When in doubt, the CVs in this repository will be the source of truth for the input4MIPs project.

Finally, the CVs also have some reliance on other conventions. The most notable is the CF metadata conventions. We also use cfchecker for validating files. Where the CVs make use of other conventions, we make this as clear as possible. However, this is also a work in progress.

Files database

The second key piece of information is a database of the files we know about within the input4MIPs project. At the moment, this database is stored as a JSON file within this repository, Database/input4MIPs_db_file_entries.json (although this may change in future, if this solution doesn't scale well). This database provides a record of the files known to the input4MIPs project, given that the ESGF index is not publicly queriable (nor perfectly suited to input4MIPs data, which does not always conform to the ESGF's data model, e.g. sometimes there is more than one variable in a file).

To ease exploration of the database, we provide a few pre-prepared views of the database, see database views.

Contributors

Thanks to our contributors!

Acknowledgement

The repository content has been collected from many contributors representing the input datasets for Model Intercomparison Projects (input4MIPs), including those from climate modeling groups and model intercomparison projects (MIPs) worldwide. The structure of content and tools required to maintain it was developed by climate and computer scientists from the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Climate Resource, and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project International Project Office (CMIP-IPO), with assistance from a large and expanding international community.

This work is sponsored by the Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) program of the Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD) in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) within the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science (OS). The work at PCMDI is performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.