NIWA announces free data policy

The general public are now able to download millions of pieces of climate, water resource and other environmental information for free.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is making access to its nationally significant databases free over the web. The initiative covers archived data on climate, lake level, river flow, sea level, water quality, and freshwater fish from NIWA, the MetService, and several other contributing agencies.

"We hope our free data policy will encourage further scientific discovery and contribute to good natural resource planning and decision-making by giving everyone easy access to quality-assured, scientific natural resources data," says Dr Barry Biggs, NIWA's general manager of environmental information.

"This also provides many new learning and research opportunities for school and university students. They can now explore this vast data resource to learn about New Zealand's water and climate environment and perhaps discover things previously unknown to science. NIWA's initiative also makes this data readily accessible to overseas users."

Chris Arbuckle, manager of environmental information, Environment Southland says, "This is a fantastic and long-awaited initiative by NIWA. The whole reason for gathering environmental information is to see it used, analysed, improved and explained. The more eyes you have looking at the facts the more you learn".

The free data policy covers an impressive array of archived data. The National Climate Database alone currently contains over 250 million individual measurements, including records dating back to the 1850s.

NIWA operates a continuously updated archive of all this data. This means even some historical observations are improved as new science comes to hand, such as updated "rating curves' used by hydrologists to describe the relationship between water level and river flows at particular sites on rivers.

There will also continue to be limits on access to some data which is not owned by NIWA, such as climate data from the Pacific, where the data owners themselves have imposed such restrictions. The free data policy applies to archived data, not to measurements supplied in real time.