BADC User Statistics Report 2013

The British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) came into existence in 1994 to respond to the needs of the Natural Environmental Research Council's (NERC) desire for a dedicated UK data centre for atmospheric research. Originally the Geophysical Data Facility (GDF), operated by the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), served less than 200 registered users, from which the BADC's registered user community has now grown to over 22,500 users. During the intervening period the BADC archive has grown to over 1 Pb. of accessible online data and was amalgamated with the NERC Earth Observation Data Centre (NEODC) in 2005 to form the Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA). This report presents details of the current active user base with a historical review where suitable information was available to the author. The primary sources of information for this review were the user database maintained by CEDA, HTTP and FTP download logs and BADC website access logs. It is hoped that this historical review will help to provide insights into the BADC user community to enable CEDA to continue to provide improved user services primarily targeted towards its core user community, while also enabling support for an ever diversifying user community.