The National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (TPDC) is one of the first of 20 national data centers established in 2019 by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. It is the only data center in China with the most complete scientific data for the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding regions. Recently, TPDC was reported by GEWEX Quarterly, which is the newsletter of the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) project.

The purpose of establishing TPDC is to promote the Third Pole Earth System Sciences by integrating and sharing the Third Pole data resources, particularly those obtained through the implementation of the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP) program, which was a national key program initiated in August 2017, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

TPDC provides online sharing protocols for data users, supplemented by offline sharing protocols, with bilingual data sharing in Chinese and English (https://data.tpdc.ac.cn/). There are more than 1,900 datasets shared by TPDC, covering geography, atmospheric science, cryospheric science, hydrology, ecology, geology, geophysics, natural resource science, social economy, and other fields. There are more than 31,600 registered users. TPDC complies with the “findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR)” data sharing principle, and takes a series of measures to protect the intellectual property rights of data and to give credit to data authors.

TPDC has been strengthening cooperation with international programs and projects related to the Third Pole. The Third Pole Environment (TPE) is an international program for interdisciplinary study in the Third Pole region and beyond. TPDC is responsible for providing data and system support for TPE. TPDC is also strengthening cooperation with GEWEX. Some frequently-used GEWEX datasets have been published in TPDC; at the same time, TPDC provides data and a platform to support GEWEX in enhancing access to water- and energy-related observations, data collection, and data sharing over broad high mountain regions. In the future, TPDC will continue to enhance cooperation with international programs and projects to become a reliable data repository that both provides scientific data for Third Pole research and hosts the database that stores in situ observations and model outputs.

Full-text available at:

https://www.gewex.org/gewex-content/files_mf/1590612006May2020.pdf