Data Release Guidelines

BSRN data can be made available to external users for bona fide research purposes at no cost. However, use of a particular station's data and the World Radiation Monitoring Center (WRMC) must always be explicitly acknowledged (= cited). Example for a citation of data from station SPO:

Dutton, E.G. (2007): Basic and other measurements of radiation at station South Pole (1992-02). Climate Monitoring & Diagnostics Laboratory, Boulder, doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.672599.

Further interaction with the originating site scientists is encouraged because of the potential benefit to the data user. If you are looking for a general citation for BSRN you can use the following:

Driemel, A., Augustine, J., Behrens, K., Colle, S., Cox, C., Cuevas-Agulló, E., Denn, F. M., Duprat, T., Fukuda, M., Grobe, H., Haeffelin, M., Hodges, G., Hyett, N., Ijima, O., Kallis, A., Knap, W., Kustov, V., Long, C. N., Longenecker, D., Lupi, A., Maturilli, M., Mimouni, M., Ntsangwane, L., Ogihara, H., Olano, X., Olefs, M., Omori, M., Passamani, L., Pereira, E. B., Schmithüsen, H., Schumacher, S., Sieger, R., Tamlyn, J., Vogt, R., Vuilleumier, L., Xia, X., Ohmura, A., and König-Langlo, G.: Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN): structure and data description (1992–2017), Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 1491-1501, doi:10.5194/essd-10-1491-2018, 2018.

BSRN data sets provided by the WRMC must not be passed to a third party without the agreement of the WRMC. The above restriction shall not apply to any BSRN data which are made public through publication, presumably with some added value, and/or are incorporated into additional project(s) for wide release. In such events all BSRN data should be clearly identified as such in that release, with information as to how to obtain the original data directly from the BSRN archive. A copy of the publication is to be provided directly to the originator or preferably via the WRMC who will forward it to the originator. The direct commercial use (selling) of the data is forbidden.

All datasets retrievable directly via ftp and PANGAEA are read account restricted. Only persons who follow the data release guidelines are allowed to use the data. Read accounts for both - PANGAEA and ftp access - can be obtained from Opens window for sending emailAmelie Driemel.

Data Retrieval

As an alternative to the Opens internal link in current windowftp-access to the rather complex station-to-archive files the World Radiation Monitoring Center at AWI offers data access via the Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data Opens internal link in current windowPANGAEA. Within PANGAEA all monthly BSRN-files are split up into their different logical records (LR), see links below.

Data Quality

The station scientists are responsible for the quality of their submitted data. Within the archive all incoming data are format-checked and visualized. Files with the most obvious errors are not imported into the archive but are returned to the submitter. Although this procedures insures the basic integrity of the data set, detailed quality checks of the archived data and resulting quality flags have not yet been applied to the data. Thus, the

WRMC highly recommends that all users do their own quality checks of the data after extracting BSRN-data!!!

Since the beginning of 2012 the WRMC offers a BSRN-Toolbox which can be used to perform these Initiates file downloadQC checks.

Any user who finds questionable data should inform the WRMC staff (Amelie Driemel) about the problem so the data can be double checked. If the problem is severe, the WRMC staff will contact the corresponding station scientists for corrections. If the corrected data cannot be submitted within a reasonable period of time, the questionable data will be deleted from PANGAEA, and a warning will be given in the corresponding station directory of the ftp-archive.

Available Data Summaries