The Greenland Climate Network (GC-Net) consists of 31 automatic weather stations (AWSs) at 30 sites across the Greenland Ice Sheet. The first site was initiated in 1990, and the project has operated almost continuously since 1995 under the leadership of the late Konrad Steffen. The GC-Net AWS measured air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, downward and reflected shortwave irradiance, net radiation, and ice and firn temperatures. The majority of the GC-Net sites were located in the ice sheet accumulation area (17 AWSs), while 11 AWSs were located in the ablation area, and two sites (three AWSs) were located close to the equilibrium line altitude. Additionally, three AWSs of similar design to the GC-Net AWS were installed by Konrad Steffen's team on the Larsen C ice shelf, Antarctica. After more than 3 decades of operation, the GC-Net AWSs are being decommissioned and replaced by new AWSs operated by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS). Therefore, making a reassessment of the historical GC-Net AWS data is necessary. We present a full reprocessing of the historical GC-Net AWS dataset with increased attention to the filtering of erroneous measurements, data correction and derivation of additional variables: continuous surface height, instrument heights, surface albedo, turbulent heat fluxes, and 10 m ice and firn temperatures. This new augmented GC-Net level-1 (L1) AWS dataset is now available at https://doi.org/10.22008/FK2/VVXGUT (Steffen et al., 2023) and will continue to be refined. The processing scripts, latest data and a data user forum are available at https://github.com/GEUS-Glaciology-and-Climate/GC-Net-level-1-data-processing (last access: 30 November 2023). In addition to the AWS data, a comprehensive compilation of valuable metadata is provided: maintenance reports, yearly pictures of the stations and the station positions through time. This unique dataset provides more than 320 station years of high-quality atmospheric data and is available following FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data and code practices.

Geoportals are used to support the sharing of geospatial data for various purposes. In recent years, the importance of such geoportals in an academic environment is highly recognized. Equipped with the latest and most detailed spatial datasets these academic geoportals can support universities in numerous activities including research and teaching. One of the key characteristics that significantly influences the effectiveness of the academic geoportals is their Graphical User Interface (GUI). GUI designers can now benefit from emerging web technologies that assist in the production of intuitive interfaces to ensure high efficiency, good User Experience (UE), maximum usability and simultaneously the minimum cognitive workload. In this paper, we introduce the new GUI of the Geodata Versatile Information Transfer environment geoportal, and we present the results of a between-subjects study with 20 participants for the evaluation and comparison of the previous and the latest version. The results show that the GUI adaptations done, have a positive influence to several indicators like efficiency, UE, usability and cognitive workload. Our findings additionally reveal the weaknesses of the latest design and give constructive feedback in order to identify in which areas we should further improve the GUI to keep spinning the wheel of design.

The Environmental Data Portal EnviDat aims to fuse data publication repository functionalities with next-generation web-based environmental geospatial information systems (web-EGIS) and Earth Observation (EO) data cube functionalities. User requirements related to mapping and visualization represent a major challenge for current environmental data portals. The new Cloud Optimized Raster Encoding (CORE) format enables an efficient storage and management of gridded data by applying video encoding algorithms. Inspired by the cloud optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format, the design of CORE is based on the same principles that enable efficient workflows on the cloud, addressing web-EGIS visualization challenges for large environmental time series in geosciences. CORE is a web-native streamable format that can compactly contain raster imagery as a data hypercube. It enables simultaneous exchange, preservation, and fast visualization of time series raster data in environmental repositories. The CORE format specifications are open source and can be used by other platforms to manage and visualize large environmental time series.

Cloud computing has redefined the way in which Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and Web geoportals are designed, managed, and maintained. The cloudification of a geoportal represents the migration of a full-stack geoportal application to an internet-based private or public cloud. This work introduces two generic and open cloud-based architectures for auto-scalable Web geoportals, illustrated with the use case of the cloudification efforts of the Swiss academic geoportal GeoVITe. The presented cloud-based architectural designs for auto-scalable Web geoportals consider the most important functional and non-functional requirements and are adapted to both public and private clouds. The availability of such generic cloud-based architectures advances the cloudification of academic SDIs and geoportals.

Geoportals play a major role in geospatial data distribution to end-users like researchers and engineers. For maximum effectiveness, an intuitive and comprehensive graphical user interface (GUI) is a paramount property of such portals. GeoVITe (GEOdata Visualization and Interactive Training Environment) is a geodata-sharing portal, providing ETH Zurich employees with direct access to geoinformation and geoservices. The guiding functional requirement for the GeoVITe geoportal is that a user should visually (spatially, thematically and temporally) navigate the spatial data, select the desired dataset and area and directly download the required data in a straightforward manner through a user-friendly GUI running in a standard Web browser. After several improvements that have been made to GeoVITe since its wide-spread launch in 2010, the user interface of GeoVITe was recently put under scrutiny with the help of a usability evaluation. Results showed multiple possibilities for improvement, belonging to one of three categories: (i) distribution of GUI elements, (ii) concentration on relevant functionality and (iii) improvements to the geodata download workflow. Based on these findings, three key recommendations for designing a geoportal can be made: (i) full-screen map with simple navigation, (ii) instant user feedback and (iii) multifunctional search. Further work will require an assessment of the presented redesign as a next step in the iterative process of GUI design improvement.