Scientific Working Group for Data Protocols and Management: Call for volunteers
During session of the Scientific Working Group on Data Protocols and Management at the IAMC Annual Meeting 2022 two topics were discussed, (i) sharing of code and datasets relevant for the development and maintenance of IAMs, and (ii) management and development of the IAMC data template.
For the sharing of code and data two repositories are currently operated by the IAMC, i.e. a GitHub organization (https://github.com/IAMconsortium/) and a Zenodo community (https://zenodo.org/communities/iamconsortium/). IAMC members are encouraged to add material they have in these repositories to those communities. During the discussions it was pointed out that establishing a metadata repository would allow creating pointers to relevant resources in the above and other repositories, journals, websites, etc. without the need to repost data and other resources in the above repositories. In this way, establishing IAMC communities in other regional or topic-focused repositories would be an option, but via the metadata repository maintaining a single entry point for IAMC resources.
The IAMC data template since it was first established in 2009 has been used in dozens of model intercomparison exercises with tens of thousands of different variables defined across all of these applications. In addition, the scope of integrated assessment modeling continues to broaden, thereby creating the need for expanding and – based on experience in model applications – revising the template. Due to the numerous activities and the large number of variables, the management of the data template and in particular the variable definitions have become a challenge. As a result, it was decided at the IAMC annual meeting to establish a series of small working groups in charge of specific parts of the data template and a coordination mechanism across these working groups to maintain coherence of the template. An initial proposal for the template working groups can be found below:
- emissions (incl. carbon management, carbon dioxide removal)
- primary energy, secondary energy, energy prices
- industry (incl. non-energy use, materials)
- buildings
- transport (incl. bunkers)
- techno-economic information, energy capacity & investment
- macro-economy (incl. demography, value added, employment, effort sharing, household, governance, policy, trade, energy (trade))
- land (incl. agriculture, food, forestry, land cover, water (agriculture))
- sustainable development goals (incl., air quality, health, resilience, risk, energy access)
During the meeting, a number of people volunteered for participation in these working groups. We are searching for additional volunteers and ask you to get in touch via co-chairs_data_swg@iamconsortium.org in case you are interested in taking over responsibility in one of the working groups.
