PaCTS 1.0: A Crowdsourced Reporting Standard for Paleoclimate Data

Abstract

The progress of science is tied to the standardization of measurements, instruments, and data. This is especially true in the Big Data age, where analyzing large data volumes critically hinges on the data being standardized. Accordingly, the lack of community‐sanctioned data standards in paleoclimatology has largely precluded the benefits of Big Data advances in the field. Building upon recent efforts to standardize the format and terminology of paleoclimate data, this article describes the Paleoclimate Community reporTing Standard (PaCTS), a crowdsourced reporting standard for such data. PaCTS captures which information should be included when reporting paleoclimate data, with the goal of maximizing the reuse value of paleoclimate data sets, particularly for synthesis work and comparison to climate model simulations. Initiated by the LinkedEarth project, the process to elicit a reporting standard involved an international workshop in 2016, various forms of digital community engagement over the next few years, and grassroots working groups. Participants in this process identified important properties across paleoclimate archives, in addition to the reporting of uncertainties and chronologies; they also identified archive‐specific properties and distinguished reporting standards for new versus legacy data sets. This work shows that at least 135 respondents overwhelmingly support a drastic increase in the amount of metadata accompanying paleoclimate data sets. Since such goals are at odds with present practices, we discuss a transparent path toward implementing or revising these recommendations in the near future, using both bottom‐up and top‐down approaches.

Extending the Instrumental Record of Ocean-Atmosphere Variability into the Last Interglacial Using Tropical Corals

“…They can be used, in combination with proxy system models and isotope-enabled climate models (Dee et al, 2015;Brocas et al, 2018;Stevenson et al, 2018;Lawman et al, 2020), to investigate the fundamen tal dynamics of tropical ocean-atmo sphere variability, investigations that will ultimately lead to a better understanding of how this important component of the Earth system works. Following paleo climate data reporting and archiving standards agreed on by the scientific community (Khider et al, 2019), the growing network of coral records can serve synthesis studies on various aspects of past tropical marine climate (Tierney et al, 2015;Abram et al, 2016).…”

The Iso2k Database: A global compilation of paleo-δ<sup>18</sup>O and δ<sup>2</sup>H records to aid understanding of Common Era climate

“…One of the obstacles to synthesizing hydroclimate-sensitive paleoclimate records has been a lack of standardized metadata at the proxy system level that systematically encodes important variables necessary for both integrating records into a multiproxy synthesis, and interpreting the results. Although the paleoclimate community is in the process of defining and adopting metadata conventions (Khider et al, 2019), the 'bare minimum' current standards (e.g., ISO 19115 for geographic metadata) used by World Data System (WDS) repositories (e.g., NOAA Paleoclimatology, PANGAEA) are insufficient for characterizing water isotope proxy systems in a way that can be reliably applied to large-scale paleo-hydroclimate syntheses.…”

A late Pleistocene dataset of Agulhas Current variability

“…Notably, the fact that the 14 C raw data are provided makes the present data set easy to update using a future 14 C calibration curve. This is also the case for the provided proxy-raw data that can be used to be calibrated and/ or corrected in different manners if desired by the user compliant with the recommendations of the Paleoclimate Community reporTing Standard (PaCTS) 1.0 56 Moreover, we show a published, but updated, dataset upstream in the Agulhas Current (marine sediment core CD154 17-17 K, Figs. 1, 4), 23 in comparison.…”