The agenda of the meeting centered on the two main objectives:
1) Revise the LTER meteorological observation standards;
2) Formulate standards and procedures for making LTER climate data publicly available with methodology for continually updating these data. Additionally, establish metadata content requirements for meteorological observations.
The principal work for objective 1 was to a) flesh out information on radiation observation to include UV-B observation and to make clear the links between climatic radiation observation and remote sensing observation, b) to instructively comment on the increasing (and virtually universal) use of electronic observation of climate data - the frequent (almost default) employment of Campbell systems and their relation to data storage and processing, and c) to be explicit about the relation between observed climate data and ecosystem modeling.
The principal work for objective 2 was to a) review the ClimDB prototype for harvesting climate data from LTER sites to a centralized location, b) review the ClimDB data exchange formats and the use of the V-ONE and V-MANY data distribution formats, c) review and decide on the use of algorithms for producing the standard data formats and summaries, d) decide on data flags for missing and questionable data and how such data should be handled in its publicly available format, e) compose the climate data variable dictionary i.e. a dictionary which defines and explains exactly what each climate variable is - for example how mean temperature is computed, f) produce a uniform template for the description of metadata for each data variable.
The product from the meeting will be a document on the LTER Information Management part of the Network Office web page. A draft of this document can be found at: Standards97