19.12.2018
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) supports coordination and harmonization of in situ data rescue activities around the world. This article describes a service to digitize documented instrumental data records extending back a century or more, and to make these records easily accessible for further processing and analysis.
Part of the interactive global map of the prototype C3S data rescue service portal, visualizing I-DARE (International Data Rescue) portal activities (green dots), and metadata inventories of surface observations (red dots)
Quelle: Copernicus C3S
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) invited in 2016 tenders for services related to collection and processing of in situ observations in support of climate services development. One of these services is the coordination and harmonization of in situ data rescue activities around the world. The objective is to facilitate and support ongoing efforts to digitize documented instrumental data records extending back a century or more, and to make these records easily accessible for further processing and analysis. A consortium of 14 partners, led by the Met Office, has been entrusted by C3S to develop this data rescue service in the period 2017-2020. The service will run an online portal with data rescue activity information and metadata of past, current and planned climate data rescue projects, provide a wide range of data rescue tools, and run capacity building workshops. This article describes the plans and developments for the C3S data rescue service.
Rescuing data and making the digitized data easily accessible has many benefits. Longer time series resulting from data rescue activities enable a better estimation of climate variability and a better detection and attribution of climate trends, particularly for the pre-satellite period and data-sparse regions like Africa and the Southern Hemisphere. Time series of 30 year or more are needed for developing seasonal forecasts, and much longer for decadal forecasts. Independent rescued data can also be used for validation of reanalyzes and forecasts.
The C3S data rescue portal will provide data rescue activity information, a registry service for metadata related to rescued data, and offer data rescue tools. A prototype portal is available at https://drs-beta.bopen.eu/. This portal with associated services and tools is planned to be fully integrated with the recently launched C3S Climate Data Store (http://cds.climate.copernicus.eu) in 2019.
Copernicus is the European Commission’s flagship Earth observation programme. It delivers freely accessible operational data and information services which provide users with reliable and up-to-date information related to environmental issues.
C3S is implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Commission. ECMWF also implements the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). ECMWF is an independent intergovernmental organisation, producing and disseminating numerical weather predictions to its 34 Member and Co-operating States.
