TOAR-II Started

The Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR), an international initiative with more than 200 participants from over 30 countries, has recently launched its second phase. TOAR-I has produced eight peer-reviewed articles in the journal “Elementa – Science of the Anthropocene” which have been cited about 240 times within less than two years, and a number of follow-up publications in other journals have also generated relatively high citation counts.

A big part of TOAR’s success is its database of more than 1 billion global surface measurements, which is hosted and maintained at JSC. This database is unique in terms of the online analysis capabilities that are offered via the JOIN web interface (https://join.fz-juelich.de). JSC will play an even stronger role in TOAR-II as Martin Schultz from JSC has been appointed as co-chair of the initiative together with Owen Cooper from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Work is ongoing to redesign the metadata schema of TOAR data to better adhere to FAIR data principles, optimize the performance of the database, and develop more automated workflows for data imports and metadata updates. Thanks to EUDAT’s B2SHARE service, it is already possible to generate DOI-referenced data publications with rich metadata of datasets that have been submitted for inclusion in the TOAR database or that accompany a journal publication that is closely linked to the assessment report. Further information on TOAR can be found at https://igacproject.org/activities/TOAR.

Contact: Dr. Martin Schultz, m.schultz@fz-juelich.de

from JSC News, No. 270, 13 March 2020