Dear all,

as I announced in my mail concerning the "call for data" we also need some metadata for your experiments.

As an example for you to see how the metadata will appear in the CERA database, I filled them for some ECHAM5 experiments. To have a look at them, please go to:

cera-www.dkrz.de/CERA

then: click here to access the CERA user interface

        browse experiments

click in the right menue "ENSEMBLES" and "select project"

Now you see in the lower menue the already available experiments for ENSEMBLES.

You can choose one of them and have a look at the experiment information and the datasets.

To create these metadata, we need to get the appropriate information for your experiments from you in form of .xml-files. To create such files please have a look at our website:

www.mad.zmaw.de/wdc-for-climate/cera-database/insert-metadata/

Here you have two alternatives to provide the metadata to us.:

On the "main metadata entry page" you find two templates for experiment metadata and for dataset metadata and the information you need to fill them. We need one template for every experiment and one for every dataset.

On the "Quick info for model data provider" you can get one template for an experiment with all corresponding datasets, which we can expand to the appropriate set of templates with a list of the variables you will transfer.

For the second alternative here some additional special information for ENSEMBLES to some of the points:

2. Citations: please name one or more citations to describe your model and the scenario (like we did for the ECHAM5-experiments).

4. You don't need to create a project description (for ENSEMBLES), because it is already done.

5. It is very important to have a meaningful summary, including some technical data as well (compare the ECHAM5 summaries in the CERA)

6. I will complete the list of keywords, if one is missed.

7. The list of variables you will transfer only has to contain the CF-names or the short_names of the final output list you got, the height (surface, 2m, 10m, 500hPa etc), and the cell-methods value, if there is any

8. We only need the grid-information, the format is netCDF, anyway.

Even if you choose to use the second way to provide the metadata it will be necessary to have a look at the "main metadata entry page" to get the information you need about valid values you can use in some cases.

I hope this information enables you to create the necessary metadata for ENSEMBLES. Please notice that we can fill your data into the CERA database only after we have filled the metadata of that experiment.

Looking forward to see many of you in Reading next week,

kind regards

Silke