Polar Data Accessibility Webinar shares a breadth of information/data with folks and how to access it!

On November 10th, 2022, polar scientists had the opportunity to learn about where to find and how to access Antarctic and Arctic data from the Polar Geospatial Center (PGC), National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Arctic Data Center, United States Antarctic Program Data Center (USAP-DC), Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA), and QGreenland within PSECCO's Polar Data Accessibility Webinar. You can access a recording of the webinar here. 

The following are locations where you can access data and to whom you can ask questions at each of the respective centers. 

• Polar Geospatial Center

  • Data access link: https://www.pgc.umn.edu/data/

  • Email: pgc-support@umn.edu - reaches entire User Services team (staff and leadership) at PGC 

• National Snow and Ice Data Center

  • Data access link: https://nsidc.org/data/explore-data

  • Email: nsidc@nsidc.org

• Arctic Data Center

  • Data access link: https://arcticdata.io/catalog/data

  • Home page: arcticdata.io 

  • Searchable directory of all public portals: https://arcticdata.io/catalog/portals

  • Email: support@arcticdata.io for questions regarding data submission and archival, and training@arcticdata.io for questions regarding our training courses 

• United States Antarctic Program-Data Center  

  • Data access link: https://www.usap-dc.org/ 

  • Email: info@usap-dc.org 

• ELOKA

  • Data access link: https://eloka-arctic.org/products

  • Email: betsy.sheffield@colorado.edu  

• QGreenland 

  • Data access link: https://qgreenland.org

  • Email: qgreenland.info@gmail.com 

Thank you to everyone who showed up to the event in real-time, and to the representatives from each of the above data centers who shared about the work that they do. We look forward to seeing you at the next PSECCO professional development event!

Q&A

I'm often asked by educators on how they can access current data (for lesson plans, etc.). Do any of the data centers provide summary data and/or views for the non-scientist? Or, training?

USAP-DC: At the moment we don't have specific curator datasets for teachers, but all our datasets are freely available and we are happy to help finding specific resources. 
There is some good curriculum material available through PolarTrec https://www.polartrec.com/
Other potential tools for teachers are:
- PolarExplorer (https://www.polar-explorer.org/
- GeoMapApp (https://www.geomapapp.org/)
- QAntarctica (https://www.npolar.no/quantarctica/)

Are all of the presented repositories searchable through datacite.org or would you be able to point to another more relevant global dataset search engine?

USAP-DC: The datasets we have in the USAP-DC repository are listed with DataCite. We have also some more specific links on our web site (https://www.usap-dc.org/links). Other global portals to find data are: 

• DataONE (https://search.dataone.org/data)
• Antarctic Metadata Directory (https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/portal/amd/search)
• POLDER federated search (https://search-dev.polder.info/)
• Google Data Search (https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/)
• Open Polar Search (https://openpolar.no/)