Congratulations to the winners of the International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences!

Last month at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting, the above award was given to the Nimbus Data Rescue Project of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, an organization at the University of Colorado, Boulder, funded by NOAA, NASA, and NSF.  According to Showstack (2014), the Nimbus project is "recovering, reprocessing, and digitizing infrared and visible data from the NASA-funded Nimbus 1, 2, and 3 weather satellites, the first of which launched in 1964.  None of the early Nimbus data had been available for 4 decades because of archaic data formats and difficulty in accessing film rolls."  Three runners up for the prize were also chosen: you can read more about them here as well as in Showstack (2014).

The award is sponsored by the Integrated Earth Data Applications group at Columbia University, and Elsevier, who has a business interest in data stewardship services. Elsevier might be considered a controversial player, as many researchers are unhappy with their allegedly predatory journal pricing policies. Nonetheless, we should praise them when they do something right, an this appears to be a rare example.

I've written previously about data stewardship issues here and here. I am pleased that the scientific community is giving more and more attention to such issues, as exemplified by this new award program. I hope that it continues and that similar awards emerge for other sciences.  I am also more than relieved to begin a new year of blogging with some positive news.

Reference

Randy Showstack, 2014: Award program recognizes efforts to protect geoscience data. EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 95 (1): 2.