Central to NOAA’s commitment to open science is making data we produce accessible and usable to others. As datasets become increasingly large and complex, more state-of-the-art data science tools and techniques are required to handle them effectively. An unintended consequence of these more advanced tools and techniques is that they may become barriers to access, even when the data are published and openly accessible in public warehouses.
To reduce these barriers, we are enlisting two interns to lead development of a portfolio of resources and tutorials to assist users in accessing and analyzing a very large dataset of modeled stream temperature recently published to the Riverscapes Data Exchange (https://data.riverscapes.net/). Such resources may include, but are not limited to: a jupyter notebook demonstrating how to download, open, filter, and visualize a project; python or R templates users can build from to develop their own data analyses; a curated collection of helpful existing online resources to aid users in understanding certain data structures or data science techniques; a video demonstration with live code posted to YouTube or elsewhere. An important aspect of this project will be resolving some known gaps and issues with the dataset, as well as to identify and resolve new issues as they arise.