New Integrated Date Rescue Portal - Facilitating DARE Projects

A new data rescue portal is designed to facilitate and coordinate the rescue of weather and climate data from around the world. It is hosted at https://datarescue.climate.copernicus.eu/. The practical information, data rescue (DARE) projects and metadata inventories originate from initiatives of both the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). All practical information of the WMO I-DARE portal is merged into this current project and will be replaced by the new portal. IEDRO and ACRE are collaborators for the content of the website.The mission of the portal is as follows:a collaborative framework on sharing information, best practices, know-how, guidance, metadata on data rescue projects and activities worldwide, provides a single entry point for accessing information on the status of climate data being digitized or in need of recovery and digitization, and enables collaboration among organizations, development agencies, donors, scientists, NGOs, citizens, to work on the data recovery and digitization of climate heritage which is at risk of loss forever. One of the main features on the website is the opportunity to highlight your data rescue project. By making your efforts known and publicly available, chances are decreased that the same data is rescued twice by other groups. Additionally, we encourage owners of rescued data to share this in a global repository, so that the valued data will not get lost again. The data portal and project collection also serves as a starting point for donors to select viable DARE projects which need support. It offers donors the perspective that DARE is done following internationally agreed procedures and that rescued data are shared with the global community rather than the data ending-up in some poorly accessible local file system, which is a multiplier of investment.The C3S Datarescue work package contributes and monitors the efforts on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to aid data rescue efforts. The development of a proof of concept for a data rescue image repository is in line with future methods to retrieve valuable meteorological data from scanned paper records with OCR. During the presentation, we will present the latest progress of the C3S DARE work package on the DARE portal, which includes articles on AI efforts to rescue meteorological data.