SAN FRANCISCO, January 7, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --
Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and
medical information products and services, and IEDA (Integrated
Earth Data Applications), an NSF-funded data facility in the
geosciences at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, announced the winner of the
2013 International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences at the
American Geophysical Union meeting. The award - a stone trophy and
$ 5,000 - was awarded to the NIMBUS
Data Rescue Project, developed by the Distributed Active Archive
Center (DAAC) at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in
Boulder, Colorado.
The International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences has been
established in 2013 by Elsevier and IEDA with the aim to improve
preservation and access of data in the earth sciences discipline.
This year's winner, The NIMBUS Data Rescue Project, managed the
recovery, reprocessing and digitization of the infrared and visible
observations of the Nimbus I, II and III satellites which were
collected from 1964 to 1970, along with their navigation and
formatting. Over 4,000 7-track tapes of global infrared satellite
data were read and reprocessed. Nearly 200,000 visible light images
were scanned, rectified and navigated. All the resultant data was
converted to HDF-5 (NetCDF) format and freely distributed to users
from NASA and NSIDC servers. This data was then used to calculate
monthly sea ice extents for both the Arctic and the Antarctic.
"The Nimbus project rescued data of high relevance to climate
research, extending the climatic record in the polar regions back
for at least 16 years. The quality of the rescue process was
exemplary. It had to overcome enormous challenges, requiring the
development of hardware and software to recover the data from
decayed media. What made this project the winner project though was
the fact that it actually improved the quality of the original data
for future use and that the approach that was developed can be
re-used to rescue other dataset," said Kerstin Lehnert, Director of IEDA and chair of
the judging panel.
In addition, three projects were singled out for honorary
mention:
- oldWeather, by the Zooniverse team (http://www.oldweather.org/)
- an effort that engages citizen volunteers to transcribe and
curate weather observations from ships' logs, recorded decades and
centuries ago;
- Nuclear explosion signals
(http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/Monitoring/Data/), a project
that captured the information from 8,000 Soviet-era magnetic tapes,
each holding about 10 megabytes of earthquake and explosion signal
data archived at Borovoye, Kazakhstan, by Paul
Richards and his team at the Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory of Columbia University, the
Institute of Dynamics of the Geospheres in Moscow, and the Russia Institute of
Geophysical Research in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan;
- Unlocking the Landsat archive
(http://www.ga.gov.au/earth-observation/accessing-satellite-imagery/future-of-landsat-archive.html)
by Lockheed Martin Australia, focused on making available the
images from six functional LANDSAT satellites spanning from 1972 to
the current LANDSAT 5 and 7 missions, constituting the longest
running enterprise for acquisition of satellite imagery of
Earth.
In launching the competition, Elsevier and IEDA aimed to
showcase the breadth, depth and diversity of existing initiatives
for disclosing research data within the field of geosciences, to
promote recognition of these efforts and to encourage new
developments in this direction. In addition, they are hoping to
encourage the establishment of a multi-disciplinary community
across all areas of geosciences to discuss the multitude of tools
and methods that are being developed to rescue data from oblivion
and stimulate the sharing of knowledge, tools and standards
pertaining to making research data reusable across various earth
and environmental sciences domains.
Anita de Waard, Vice President
Research Data Services at Elsevier commented, "In Earth Sciences in
particular, discovering old data is at least as important as
finding new data. All the submissions in this competition have
shown ingenuity, perseverance and that very hard work can make
unique historical contributions available to the modern-day
geoscientist. We are happy to have helped bring together this
valuable group of contributions and honor their achievements."
The judges' panel was formed by:
- Linda Gundersen, US Geological
Survey
- Helen Glaves, British Geological
Survey
- Kerstin Lehnert, IEDA
(Chair)
- Mark Parsons, Research Data
Alliance
- Lesley Wyborn, Geoscience
Australia
- Ilya Zaslavsky, University of California, San Diego
Details of the competition criteria and a link to the submitted
proposals can be found on the Data Rescue Award website:
http://researchdata.elsevier.com/datachallenge
Notes for editors
For more information about the initiative, contact organizers:
Anita de Waard, Vice President
Research Data Collaborations, Elsevier Research Data Services:
a.dewaard@elsevier.com, or Kerstin
Lehnert, Director, IEDA: lehnert@ldeo.columbia.edu
About Integrated Earth Data
Applications (IEDA)
IEDA or Integrated Earth Data Applications is a community-based
data facility funded by the US National Science Foundation
(NSF) to support, sustain, and advance the geosciences by providing
data services for observational solid earth data from the Ocean,
Earth, and Polar Sciences. IEDA systems enable these data to
be discovered and reused by a diverse community now and in the
future. IEDA operates and maintains system such as the EarthChem
Library, the Marine Geoscience Data System, PetDB, Geochron,
GeoMapApp, and the System for Earth Sample Registration SESAR.
http://www.iedadata.org
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical
and medical information products and services. The company works in
partnership with the global science and health communities to
publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and
Cell, and 25,000 book titles, including major reference
works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include
ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, Reaxys, ClinicalKey and Mosby's
Suite, which enhance the productivity of science and health
professionals, helping research and health care institutions
deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.
A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people
worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world
leading provider of professional information solutions in the
Science, Medical, Legal and Risk and Business sectors, which is
jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker
symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange),
RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).
Media contact
Harald Boersma
Director Corporate Relations, Elsevier
+31-20-485-2736
h.boersma@elsevier.com