Some of the Earth system data products such as those from NASA airborne and field investigations (a.k.a. campaigns), are highly heterogeneous and cross-disciplinary, making the data extremely challenging to manage. For example, airborne and field campaign measurements tend to be sporadic over a period of time, with large gaps. Data products generated are of various processing levels and utilized for a wide range of inter- and cross-disciplinary research and applications. Data and derived products have been historically stored in a variety of domain-specific standard (and some non-standard) formats and in various locations such as NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs), NASA airborne science facilities, field archives, or even individual scientists’ computer hard drives. As a result, airborne and field campaign data products have often been managed and represented differently, making it onerous for data users to find, access, and utilize campaign data. Some difficulties in discovering and accessing the campaign data originate from the incomplete data product and contextual metadata that may contain details relevant to the campaign (e.g. campaign acronym and instrument deployment locations), but tend to lack other significant information needed to understand conditions surrounding the data. Such details can be burdensome to locate after the conclusion of a campaign. Utilizing consistent terminology, essential for improved discovery and reuse, is also challenging due to the variety of involved disciplines. To help address the aforementioned challenges faced by many repositories and data managers handling airborne and field data, this presentation will describe stewardship practices developed by the Airborne Data Management Group (ADMG) within the Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT) under the NASA’s Earth Science Data systems (ESDS) Program.

The knowledge of data quality and the quality of the associated information, including metadata, is critical for data use and reuse. Assessment of data and metadata quality is key for ensuring credible available information, establishing a foundation of trust between the data provider and various downstream users, and demonstrating compliance with requirements established by funders and federal policies. Data quality information should be consistently curated, traceable, and adequately documented to provide sufficient evidence to guide users to address their specific needs. The quality information is especially important for data used to support decisions and policies, and for enabling data to be truly findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Clear documentation of the quality assessment protocols used can promote the reuse of quality assurance practices and thus support the generation of more easily-comparable datasets and quality metrics. To enable interoperability across systems and tools, the data quality information should be machine-actionable. Guidance on the curation of dataset quality information can help to improve the practices of various stakeholders who contribute to the collection, curation, and dissemination of data. This presentation introduces international community guidelines to curate data quality information that is consistent with the FAIR principles throughout the entire data life cycle and inheritable by any derivative product. Supportive case studies demonstrate the applicability of the proposed guidelines.