Graves Sarah

Abstract Reference: 30786
Identifier: O2.2
Presentation: Oral communication
Key Theme: 4 Long-term Management of Data Archives 

The JCMT SCUBA-2 Legacy Release: Unexpected Benefits and Lessons Learned

Authors:
Graves Sarah, Bell Graham, Currie Malcolm, Berry David, 

East Asian Observatory is currently releasing all SCUBA-2 850um data taken from 2011 to 2015, re-reduced in a uniform manner with automatically produced coadds and catalogs. While the primary reason for doing this release was to produce a scientifically useful data product for our community, the process of creating it generated many benefits for the observatory itself.  We produced a new 'generic' configuration file for our reductions that we moved to using as our default configuration due to the improvement in map quality we saw with it. We have also developed new and improved software and systems for running (and easily re-running) various automated pipeline reductions.  We built into this a new, and fairly flexible quality assurance system now used for our nightly reductions.  The analysis of the data prior to release helped us discover (and fix) some bugs and identify areas ripe for further investigation. This paper will describe these side benefits, and also discuss what attitudes and policies at the observatory ensured they occurred. The whole process has also helped the observatory gain a clearer understanding of exactly which pieces of information and metadata are most needed to be able to easily select 'good' science observations from a heterogeneous data set of differing PI and Calibration observations. We can now use this information to improve our systems and our archive; thereby better supporting both our own, future data releases, and our community's use of the JCMT science archive.