Abstract
The information provided in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; http://ipcc.ch) Assessment Reports (ARs) inform climate change policy development. Within the IPCC the scientific coordination of the ARs is conducted by three Working Groups (WGs) comprising of the Bureaus supported by their Technical Support Units (TSUs). Data management support is provided by the IPCC Data Distribution Centre (DDC; http://ipcc-data.org), which is overseen by the Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data; formerly TGICA). The DDC is a federated structure that is currently managed by the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA; http://www.ceda.ac.uk/), United Kingdom; the World Data Center for Climate (WDCC; http://www.wdc-climate.de), Germany; and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN; http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/) at Columbia University, U.S.
For the IPCC Sixth Assessment cycle (AR6), analyses of climate simulations and observations published in scientific literature will be assessed. The reports will include figures and tables prepared from the underlying digital information. The DDC plays an increasingly important role in facilitating the exchange of data, as well as curating the assessed datasets, scripts and provenance records to facilitate the assessment process and to support the traceability of AR6 results through long-term continuity of data management and curation. These issues, among others, are addressed by the DDC support group (https://cedadev.github.io/ipcc_ddc) currently consisting of members from the three TSUs and the three DDC managers.