Frequently asked questions about the TOAR Database (data provider)

How flexible are you with respect to the time format? Your recommendation is not exactly ISO and doesn‘t include seconds.

The closer you come to our recommended format, the easier it is for us to insert your data. We can work with the ISO format (including the „T“ between date and time) and you can include seconds in the format. However, seconds will be ignored.

Do you accept data in resolutions other than hourly?

Hourly is the minimum resolution your data should have. We also accept data in half-hour, 15 minutes, or 10 minutes resolution. They will be automatically aggregated when querying the database. If you have data with a time resolution not listed here, please contact us at toar-data@fz-juelich.de

If we already submitted data to the GAW data centre. Do we have to resubmit this to TOAR?

GAW data will be harvested from EBAS (provided that license issues can be sorted out quickly).

What happens if we submit a corrected version of our data to the GAW data centre after you harvested the data from there. Do we have to inform you about this?

Yes, please! It would be great to have automatic tracking of changes, but we are not there yet.

Is there a place to upload measurement intercomparison data?

Such data can be posted on the TOAR data publication server (https://b2share.fz-juelich.de/communities/TOAR). However, a TOAR WG should try to harmonize such information before sending the data to us.

Some data in TOAR-v1 did not comply with the CC-BY 4 license. Will data providers be contacted to obtain a new agreement?

Yes. The TOAR-II database is a separate new database which is filled from scratch. We prefer to re-insert original data as there may have been changes applied in the meantime and our new metadata is more extensive. But if need be, „old“ data can be copied, if the data provider agrees.