Surface Ocean / Lower Atmosphere Study (UK SOLAS)

International SOLAS Summer School - Closing Date 1 February

Introduction

The UK Surface Ocean / Lower Atmosphere Study (UK SOLAS) is a Directed Mode programme of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The overall aim of UK SOLAS is to advance understanding of environmentally significant interactions between the atmosphere and ocean, focusing on material exchanges that involve ocean productivity, atmospheric composition and climate. The five-year programme started in 2004 and will end in 2009. UK SOLAS is part of the international SOLAS programme whose project office is based at the University of East Anglia, UK. Five SOLAS projects feature at the BADC and these are:

Dust Outflow and Deposition (DODO)

The impact of atmospheric dust derived metal and nutrient inputs on tropical North Atlantic near surface plankton microbiota

Reactive Halogens in the Marine Boundary Layer (Formation of Ultrafine Particles and Atmospheric Cycling) (RHaMBLe)

Measurements at the Cape Verde Observatory

Global Modelling of Aerosols and Chemistry in Support of UK SOLAS

The individual web pages for these projects have project specific information.

Access to data

Data management, availability and use are governed by the UK SOLAS Programme Data Management Plan (PDF document). Access to the archive is restricted to the participants of each project for the first year. To access these data, follow the instructions on the individual project pages linked to above. The data are restricted for a second year to participants in the UK SOLAS programme, after which they will be made public.

If you are a programme participant and would like to access the data, then please follow the link to your project page in the introduction section above and register.

Data format - File names

The standard formats for the UK SOLAS programme are NetCDF and NASA Ames.

File names follow the BADC file name convention.

Instructions to data providers

Data file format
The standard formats for use in UK SOLAS are either NetCDF (binary) or NASA Ames (ASCII) format. To ensure the future usability of the data, it is important to include all necessary information about the data with the file. This is termed metadata. The data files submitted should conform to the Climate and Forecasts (CF) Metadata Convention. If you wish to check that files are correctly formatted before uploading them please use the NetCDF format checker or NASA-Ames format checker. Many data files contain the variable time which can be expressed in several ways. Guidelines on the recommended format of the time-variable header lines, units and the data values in Nasa-Ames files are available and are based on the format used in NetCDF.

Data file names
Please use standardised filenames as described on the file-naming convention page. Note that the first component of the file name is the instrument (or group of instruments, or model) name. Please refer to the current list of standard instrument/model names and advise the BADC if your instrument or model is not yet in the list.

Data file submission
To upload your data files to the BADC, you will need to register for one of the above projects which are linked from the top of the page.
The UK SOLAS web uploader will allow you to submit data files or documents to the BADC. Large amounts of files can also be submitted by ftp.