Analysis of Surface Temperature: UKMO Workshop Summary Stephan Bojinski, GCOS Secretariat GCOS SC-XVIII, 30 Sep 2010

Background Society expects openness and transparency in the understanding of the (un)certainty on how climate has changed and how it will continue to change UKMO-led Proposal for a new International Analysis of Land- Surface Air Temperature Data, endorsed by WMO Commission for Climatology, 15th session, February white papers solicited, with international authorship, and open comment period Moderated blog

Workshop 7-9 Sep 2010 Hosted by UKMO Hadley Centre, Exeter Sponsored by WMO, WCRP, GCOS, UK Royal Meteorological Society, UKMO, University of Exeter, NOAA NCDC, US GCOS Office >80 participants, including from NCDC, CRU, UKMO, DWD, JMA, CMA, MeteoFrance, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Australia, WMO CCl, GCOS SC and Secretariat, WCRP, SST community, metrology community, statistics community, IT community

Workshop Topics 1.Creation and maintenance of a databank Retrieval of historical data, Data rescue Near real-time updates of databank Data policy Data provenance, version control, configuration management 2.Analysis, creation of datasets, and performance assessment Creation of quality controlled homogenised datasets from the databank Benchmarking homogenisation algorithm performance against test cases Dataset algorithm performance assessment based upon all efforts Spatial and temporal interpolation 3.Publication, presentation and outreach Publication, collation of results, presentation of audit trails Solicitation of input from the community at large, including non-climate fields and discussion of web presence Governance Interactions with other activities

Results to date Major discussion points: Databank design would focus on surface temperature, but also hold data on other variables Databank would include sub-daily (SYNOP, METAR), daily (TBD) and monthly data (CLIMAT) Centralized vs distributed Only openly available data vs including data subject to restriction Unified or flexible metadata structure Would include different stages (levels) of data Digitization and data rescue using crowdsourcing Data access

Results to date Ad-hoc teams formed on Governance (WMO rep to be found) Databank and data access Benchmarking and performance assessment Scientific outreach and value-adding Interpolation methods Ad-hoc steering group (proposed Chair: Peter Thorne), with members from workshop organizing committee, sponsors (incl. GCOS), other participants To come up with an implementation roadmap by October 2011 (WCRP Open Science Conference)