Towards a Traceable Climate Service: Assessment of Quality and Usability of Essential Climate Variables

Abstract

Climate services are becoming the backbone to translate climate knowledge, data & information into climate-informed decision-making at all levels, from public administrations to business operators. It is essential to assess the technical and scientific quality of the provided climate data and information products, including their value to users, to establish the relation of trust between providers of climate data and information and various downstream users. The climate data and information products (i.e., from satellite, in-situ and reanalysis) shall be fully traceable, adequately documented and uncertainty quantified and can provide sufficient guidance for users to address their specific needs and feedbacks. This paper discusses details on how to apply the quality assurance framework to deliver timely assessments of the quality and usability of Essential Climate Variable (ECV) products. It identifies an overarching structure for the quality assessment of single product ECVs (i.e., consists of only one single variable), multi-product ECVs (i.e., more than one single parameter), thematic products (i.e., water, energy and carbon cycles), as well as the usability assessment. To support a traceable climate service, other than rigorously evaluating the technical and scientific quality of ECV products, which represent the upstream of climate services, how the uncertainty propagates into the resulting benefit (utility) for the users of the climate service needs to be detailed.

An Integrative Information Aqueduct to Close the Gaps between Satellite Observation of Water Cycle and Local Sustainable Management of Water Resources

“…These potential mismatches (between what we measure in situ and what is remotely sensed) highlight the need to understand physical processes behind different soil moisture products, which will guide the associated downscaling strategies and methodologies. Similar issues exist for other water cycle products [6,7,70].…”

“…It is to note from Figure 2b that it is not only about downscaling to the scale of interest but also upscaling. Thus, an evaluation of the physical consistency between different scales and corresponding used downscaling approaches and strategies is always needed [7,70]. Furthermore, ecohydrological model-based simulations at hyper-resolutions can reproduce the scale invariance property of soil moisture, which can be used to link scales from hundreds of meters in the field to tens of kilometers of satellite observations [59].…”

“…This is crucial to analyze and forecast the effectiveness of water management options, in particular in adaptation to climate changes. Observation of hydrological cycle components can be obtained from different sources [4][5][6][7][8]. While in situ observations provide the most reliable data for the relevant observation scale (e.g., at the centimeter scale for typical soil moisture sensors), such observations are in general inadequate in addressing water management problems, which require continuous space-time information from the local to field scale [4,5,9].…”

Increasing the maturity of measurements of essential climate variables (ECVs) at Italian atmospheric WMO/GAW observatories by implementing automated data elaboration chains

“…To this aim, we use the tool presented by Thorne et al (2017), but originally developed within the CORE-CLIMAX project (Su et al, 2018;Zeng et al, 2019), to assess the maturity of an environmental measurement network. In particular, a major strand of assessment related to the ''software readiness'' was introduced, which shall apply to measurement networks for which ''routine-automated and substantive processing occurs from the raw measured data to the provided geophysical parameters of the measurement series'' (Thorne et al, 2017;Su et al, 2018;Zeng et al, 2019). The sub-categories to be assessed are: ''Coding standards'', ''Software documentation'', ''Portability and numerical reproducibility'', and ''Security''.…”

Assessing the Quality of Regional Climate Information

“…The way quality is characterized can be very different depending on whether it is discussed in physical climate science (e.g. Zeng et al 2019;Krysanova et al 2018), environmental social science (e.g. Lemos and Moorhouse 2005;Cash et al 2003) or philosophy of science (e.g.…”