Climate Observation Networks and Systems
Climate observations are sourced from the numerous meteorological and related observational networks and systems that underpin applications such as weather forecasting, air pollution modeling and environmental impact assessments.
However, climate observations differ by a number of important respects. Firstly, climate observations need to account for the full range of elements that describe the climate system not just those that describe the atmosphere. Extensive observations of the ocean and terrestrial-based systems are required. Secondly, an observation at any point in time needs a reference climate against which it can be evaluated, i.e. a reference climatological period must be selected. In this regard, the observations from a station that only exists for a short period (i.e. from days to a few years) or which relocates very frequently will generally be of less value than those observations from a station whose records have been maintained to established standards over many years. Thus, in order to derive a satisfactory climatological average (or normal) for a particular climate element, a sufficient period record of homogeneous, continuous and good quality observations for that element is required. Thirdly, a climate observation should be associated either directly or indirectly - with a set of data (Metadata) describing the conditions in which climate observations were collected and that will provide users with information, often implicitly, on how the observation should be interpreted and used.
The more stringent requirements on observation networks and systems for monitoring climate, including the detection of climate change, has led to the development of special networks at national (e.g. Reference Climate Stations), regional (e.g. Regional Basic Climatological Network) and global (e.g. the Global Climate Observing System - GCOS - Surface Network, GSN) scales.
Climate Data Management and Exchange
Information about the weather has been recorded in manuscript form for many centuries. The early records included notes on extreme and, sometimes, catastrophic events and also on phenomena such as the freezing and thawing dates of rivers, lakes and seas, which have taken on a higher profile with recent concerns about climate change.
Specific journals for the collection and retention of climatological information have been used over the last two or three centuries. The development of instrumentation to quantify meteorological phenomenon and the dedication of observers in maintaining methodical, reliable and well-documented records paved the way for the organized management of climate data. Since the 1940s, standardized forms and procedures gradually became more prevalent and, once computer systems were being used by National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs), these forms greatly assisted the computerized data entry process and consequently the development of computer data archives and dedicated software for modern Climate Data Management. The 1960s and 1970s saw several NMHSs implementing electronic computers and gradually the information from many millions of punched cards from old mechanical devices was transferred to magnetic tape.
A major step forward occurred with the WMO World Climate Data and Monitoring Programme's (WCDMP) CLICOM project. Initiated in 1985, this project led to the installation of PC-based climate database software, backed up with hardware and a comprehensive training programme, in more than 100 NMHSs around the world. The project also provided the foundations for demonstrable improvements in climate services, applications and research in these countries. In the late 1990s, the WCDMP initiated a Climate Database Management System (CDMS) project to take advantage of the latest computer technologies to meet the varied and growing data management needs. The new CDMSs offer improved data access and security and much greater utility for users. Today, with the Internet is already delivering greatly improved data access capabilities data management is evolving as an integral part of the WMO Information System (WIS) architecture at national level, thus allowing easy discovery, access and retrieval of historical climate data to the benefit of various users of climate information and services. Any climate database will be based on some underlying model of the data. This model is very important for the quality of the resulting system, and in particular for its maintainability. An inappropriate model will tend to make the system harder to maintain. A requisite part of the quality management of an NMHS is the data Quality Control (QC) process.This should allow performing quality control process of the whole data-flow process. It should ensure that data is checked and, to the extent possible, is error-free. All errors and mistakes coming from the station site, instrument/sensor, data transmission or data entry stages must be detected and eliminated and, if possible, these should be replaced by correct values (while retaining the original values).
Exchange of data between NMHSs is essential for climate monitoring and applications. This may cover both the storage and use of data (and metadata) from other countries in the database of one NMHS, and the transmission of data to Global and Regional data centres.
WMO Member states have the obligation to share data and metadata with other members of WMO, and the conditions under which these may be passed to third parties, is covered under WMO Resolution 40 (Cg-XIII) and WMO Resolution 25 (Cg-XIV). These embody the concepts of essential and additional data, with a specification of a minimum set of data that should be made available with free and unrestricted access. Members may decide to declare as essential more than this minimum set.
Members of WMO volunteer a subset of their stations to be part of various networks, including the GCOS Upper Air Network (GUAN), the GCOS Surface Network (GSN), the Regional Basic Synoptic Network (RBSN) and Regional Basic Climatological Network (RBCN). Nomination of stations in these networks implies an obligation to share the data internationally using standard procedures and transmission protocols.
Several Data Centers are linked to the WMO Global Telecommunication System (GTS) of the WMO information System (WIS). Thereby they constitute international Climate Data archiving Centers serving various users.
Climate Data, Metadata, and Indices
A number of international centers and institutions have the expertise to deal with the huge number of climate data collected from all over the world. They have been developing and maintaining for easy access several data sets containing various climate elements and atmospheric parameters covering the three dimension of space. Reliable climate monitoring and assessment requires high level of accuracy and reliability in the data sets due to level of required precision in these areas. Therefore several challenges need to be resolved while constructing such high quality data sets. These are due to measurement and sampling error, temperature bias effects, and the effect of limited observational coverage on large-scale averages. Fortunately scientists have developed methods to keep the inherent Data uncertainty at minimal level to make sure the data sets are accurate enough for use in climate monitoring and climate change assessment. There are few international data centers which develop and maintain high quality homogenized global data sets combining land and sea surface data and having time series running from present back to more than 160 years.
The Hadley Center of the United Kingdom (UK) developed several Data sets which provide various climate records including surface, upper air and marine data sets. As an example of use of these data sets is the trend and variability analysis of the global surface temperature since the beginning of instrumental period in 1850. The data set is routinely updated and improved as more data are continuously imported in the data base.
Status of Global Climate
Monitoring the climate system at global scale needs internationally coordinated enterprise. The focus is made on tracking major indicators of temperature and precipitation trends and variations as well as elaborating statistics related to major climate system patterns and extreme weather events. The purpose is to provide on regular and systematic basis a global picture of the behaviour of the climate system in the context of global warming and climate change.
Since 1993, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), through the Commission for Climatology and in cooperation with its Members, has issued annual statements on the status of the global climate to provide credible scientific information on climate and its variability. The statement describes the climatic conditions, including extreme weather events and provides a historical perspective on the variability and trends that have occurred since the nineteenth century. The statements complement the periodic assessments of the WMO/United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The information contained in the statement enhances our scientific understanding of the climate variability and the associated impacts which affects the well being, properties and lives of people around the world.
Climate Watch and Alert Systems
Inter-annual variations can affect global and regional atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Many of these variations are recurrent and are usually depicted with well known climatic patterns such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), warming/cooling of Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) in the tropical oceans, strengthening/weakening of the upper level Jets, etc. They correlate significantly with the departures from the mean state of climate parameters at monthly, seasonal and annual time scales and with the onset of extreme weather and climate events leading to direct and indirect consequences on lives, goods, properties and the well being of societies. Droughts, heat waves, cold waves, flooding, extreme wind storms, land slides, bush and forest fires, costal erosions to list just these are the most popular induced impacts which may be triggered by one or several of such anomalies. In the context of global warming these extremes are expected to become in the future more frequent, more severe and gaining more geographical extend than usually known (IPCC AR4). Some of the observed increase in climate extremes already fit in these projections.
Setting up an effective Climate Watch System for climate extremes has been for more than a decade a focus of the WMO and the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) to improve climate risk management capabilities among nations. Such climate warning system e.g. climate watch systems are designed to provide advisories (climate watches) to inform the users, particularly those involved in natural hazards preparedness, mitigation and response on ongoing, pending and/or expected climate anomalies and their negative impacts. To this effect, NMHSs should be adequately equipped and prepared to continuously monitor and assess the state of the climate, evaluate available long range forecasts, and where conditions warrant provide to the users concise and understandable climate early warning information at weekly, 10-day, monthly, and seasonal time scale.
Climate observations are sourced from the numerous meteorological and related observational networks and systems that underpin applications such as weather forecasting, air pollution modeling and environmental impact assessments.
However, climate observations differ by a number of important respects. Firstly, climate observations need to account for the full range of elements that describe the climate system not just those that describe the atmosphere. Extensive observations of the ocean and terrestrial-based systems are required. Secondly, an observation at any point in time needs a reference climate against which it can be evaluated, i.e. a reference climatological period must be selected. In this regard, the observations from a station that only exists for a short period (i.e. from days to a few years) or which relocates very frequently will generally be of less value than those observations from a station whose records have been maintained to established standards over many years. Thus, in order to derive a satisfactory climatological average (or normal) for a particular climate element, a sufficient period record of homogeneous, continuous and good quality observations for that element is required. Thirdly, a climate observation should be associated either directly or indirectly - with a set of data (Metadata) describing the conditions in which climate observations were collected and that will provide users with information, often implicitly, on how the observation should be interpreted and used.
The more stringent requirements on observation networks and systems for monitoring climate, including the detection of climate change, has led to the development of special networks at national (e.g. Reference Climate Stations), regional (e.g. Regional Basic Climatological Network) and global (e.g. the Global Climate Observing System - GCOS - Surface Network, GSN) scales.
Climate Data Management and Exchange
Information about the weather has been recorded in manuscript form for many centuries. The early records included notes on extreme and, sometimes, catastrophic events and also on phenomena such as the freezing and thawing dates of rivers, lakes and seas, which have taken on a higher profile with recent concerns about climate change.
Specific journals for the collection and retention of climatological information have been used over the last two or three centuries. The development of instrumentation to quantify meteorological phenomenon and the dedication of observers in maintaining methodical, reliable and well-documented records paved the way for the organized management of climate data. Since the 1940s, standardized forms and procedures gradually became more prevalent and, once computer systems were being used by National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs), these forms greatly assisted the computerized data entry process and consequently the development of computer data archives and dedicated software for modern Climate Data Management. The 1960s and 1970s saw several NMHSs implementing electronic computers and gradually the information from many millions of punched cards from old mechanical devices was transferred to magnetic tape.
A major step forward occurred with the WMO World Climate Data and Monitoring Programme's (WCDMP) CLICOM project. Initiated in 1985, this project led to the installation of PC-based climate database software, backed up with hardware and a comprehensive training programme, in more than 100 NMHSs around the world. The project also provided the foundations for demonstrable improvements in climate services, applications and research in these countries. In the late 1990s, the WCDMP initiated a Climate Database Management System (CDMS) project to take advantage of the latest computer technologies to meet the varied and growing data management needs. The new CDMSs offer improved data access and security and much greater utility for users. Today, with the Internet is already delivering greatly improved data access capabilities data management is evolving as an integral part of the WMO Information System (WIS) architecture at national level, thus allowing easy discovery, access and retrieval of historical climate data to the benefit of various users of climate information and services. Any climate database will be based on some underlying model of the data. This model is very important for the quality of the resulting system, and in particular for its maintainability. An inappropriate model will tend to make the system harder to maintain. A requisite part of the quality management of an NMHS is the data Quality Control (QC) process.This should allow performing quality control process of the whole data-flow process. It should ensure that data is checked and, to the extent possible, is error-free. All errors and mistakes coming from the station site, instrument/sensor, data transmission or data entry stages must be detected and eliminated and, if possible, these should be replaced by correct values (while retaining the original values).
Exchange of data between NMHSs is essential for climate monitoring and applications. This may cover both the storage and use of data (and metadata) from other countries in the database of one NMHS, and the transmission of data to Global and Regional data centres.
WMO Member states have the obligation to share data and metadata with other members of WMO, and the conditions under which these may be passed to third parties, is covered under WMO Resolution 40 (Cg-XIII) and WMO Resolution 25 (Cg-XIV). These embody the concepts of essential and additional data, with a specification of a minimum set of data that should be made available with free and unrestricted access. Members may decide to declare as essential more than this minimum set.
Members of WMO volunteer a subset of their stations to be part of various networks, including the GCOS Upper Air Network (GUAN), the GCOS Surface Network (GSN), the Regional Basic Synoptic Network (RBSN) and Regional Basic Climatological Network (RBCN). Nomination of stations in these networks implies an obligation to share the data internationally using standard procedures and transmission protocols.
Several Data Centers are linked to the WMO Global Telecommunication System (GTS) of the WMO information System (WIS). Thereby they constitute international Climate Data archiving Centers serving various users.
Climate Data, Metadata, and Indices
A number of international centers and institutions have the expertise to deal with the huge number of climate data collected from all over the world. They have been developing and maintaining for easy access several data sets containing various climate elements and atmospheric parameters covering the three dimension of space. Reliable climate monitoring and assessment requires high level of accuracy and reliability in the data sets due to level of required precision in these areas. Therefore several challenges need to be resolved while constructing such high quality data sets. These are due to measurement and sampling error, temperature bias effects, and the effect of limited observational coverage on large-scale averages. Fortunately scientists have developed methods to keep the inherent Data uncertainty at minimal level to make sure the data sets are accurate enough for use in climate monitoring and climate change assessment. There are few international data centers which develop and maintain high quality homogenized global data sets combining land and sea surface data and having time series running from present back to more than 160 years.
The Hadley Center of the United Kingdom (UK) developed several Data sets which provide various climate records including surface, upper air and marine data sets. As an example of use of these data sets is the trend and variability analysis of the global surface temperature since the beginning of instrumental period in 1850. The data set is routinely updated and improved as more data are continuously imported in the data base.
Status of Global Climate
Monitoring the climate system at global scale needs internationally coordinated enterprise. The focus is made on tracking major indicators of temperature and precipitation trends and variations as well as elaborating statistics related to major climate system patterns and extreme weather events. The purpose is to provide on regular and systematic basis a global picture of the behaviour of the climate system in the context of global warming and climate change.
Since 1993, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), through the Commission for Climatology and in cooperation with its Members, has issued annual statements on the status of the global climate to provide credible scientific information on climate and its variability. The statement describes the climatic conditions, including extreme weather events and provides a historical perspective on the variability and trends that have occurred since the nineteenth century. The statements complement the periodic assessments of the WMO/United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The information contained in the statement enhances our scientific understanding of the climate variability and the associated impacts which affects the well being, properties and lives of people around the world.
Climate Watch and Alert Systems
Inter-annual variations can affect global and regional atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Many of these variations are recurrent and are usually depicted with well known climatic patterns such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), warming/cooling of Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) in the tropical oceans, strengthening/weakening of the upper level Jets, etc. They correlate significantly with the departures from the mean state of climate parameters at monthly, seasonal and annual time scales and with the onset of extreme weather and climate events leading to direct and indirect consequences on lives, goods, properties and the well being of societies. Droughts, heat waves, cold waves, flooding, extreme wind storms, land slides, bush and forest fires, costal erosions to list just these are the most popular induced impacts which may be triggered by one or several of such anomalies. In the context of global warming these extremes are expected to become in the future more frequent, more severe and gaining more geographical extend than usually known (IPCC AR4). Some of the observed increase in climate extremes already fit in these projections.
Setting up an effective Climate Watch System for climate extremes has been for more than a decade a focus of the WMO and the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) to improve climate risk management capabilities among nations. Such climate warning system e.g. climate watch systems are designed to provide advisories (climate watches) to inform the users, particularly those involved in natural hazards preparedness, mitigation and response on ongoing, pending and/or expected climate anomalies and their negative impacts. To this effect, NMHSs should be adequately equipped and prepared to continuously monitor and assess the state of the climate, evaluate available long range forecasts, and where conditions warrant provide to the users concise and understandable climate early warning information at weekly, 10-day, monthly, and seasonal time scale.
