Agulhas Return Current (ARC) Ocean Climate Station mooringNOAAIn the past several months, a movement has sprung up among librarians, environmental and computer scientists, and supporters of access to public data to create archives of environmental information. While the volume of material is daunting (we’re talking hundreds of millions of webpages), volunteers have made considerable headway, collecting terabytes (TB) of data to date, with more being collected all the time.
One team, called the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, had by February 11 backed up 19 TB of data from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other federal agencies that collect climate-related data. “I know there is a gap, because there are several large datasets which are still being downloaded, mostly by me,” Jan Galkowski, a statistician who contributes to the group, told The Scientist in an email. “We have the capability and will probably fill 40 TB of storage with the data we have replicated. This will take some time to move to its eventual homes, simply because network transfer speeds are not that high.”
The election of President Donald Trump, and expectations that climate-related projects in particular would face cuts ...
