1. Assignment of WSI by partner organizations – the case of C3S
Peter Thorne

2. The C3S 311a Lot family

3. C3S 311a Lot 3 – Access to Baseline and Reference Observations
4 contracts
C3S 311a Lot 1 – data rescue activities and building capacity to undertake data rescue
C3S 311a Lot 2 – Global Land and Marine Observations Database (surface meteorological observations) in collaboration with NOAA NCEI (WDC-A Meteorology).
C3S 311a Lot 3 – Access to Baseline and Reference Observations
C3S 311a Lot 4 – in-situ based gridded products and monitoring over Europe

4. All consider in-situ observations and their stewardship
Commonalities
All consider in-situ observations and their stewardship
All consider some subset of surface data
A Common Data Model (not a format in itself) has been developed
We would like to us WIGOS station identifiers

5. Can’t we just use WIGOS station identifiers as it stands?

6. Current challenges in 3rd party use of WIGOS station identifiers
The OSCAR Surface database currently consists of a finite subset of known current and historical observational assets
There is no obvious governance mechanism by which non-NMSs can add additional assets or supplementary metadata about existing assets to the database.
Or by which members can add such information for assets arising outside their territorial juristiction.
On the other hand, there are numerous potential technical solutions which could enable such cross-population of third-party information.

7. OSCAR Surface land

8. Inventoried land (all daily)

9. OSCAR Surface current holdings for land are just over 10,000 entries
Discrepancy is an order of magnitude for land surface assets (at least)
Over 280,000 candidate series held across in excess of 225 sources with at least 20 additional (in many cases large) sources still to be inventoried
contains gross redundancy
However, daily harmonized holdings suggest true number of unique present and historical stations measuring 1 or more ECVs is at least 120,000
OSCAR Surface current holdings for land are just over 10,000 entries
Contains no (long-)closed stations
Primarily consists of a Pub A scrape so highly biased to assets that report operationally SYNOP messages via WIS

10. Adding metadata to OSCAR Surface
OSCAR Surface and hence the WSI catalogue is incomplete
Does not contain all known active and closed assets
Does not contain all potential metadata (station, opening / closing, variables etc.) for those assets included
C3S activities include efforts to create metadata via inventorying and harmonization exercise that are international standards compliant and technically ‘simple’ to interface with OSCAR Surface and WSI to both provide new stations and additional metadata for existing stations.
There is currently no mechanism by which these can be added directly.

11. Options as they stand
Working on a country by country basis to share the information and engage via country with WSI and OSCAR Surface.
NMS engagement not a given
NMS capacity not a given
Overhead on individual members, Meteoswiss, and C3S onerous
Going through some ambiguous back-channel mechanism
WMO to give rights to populate directly
Unclear what the governance mandate is to do so presently
There must be a better way that engages members but enables third party contributions
C3S brings substantive resource to the table that shouldn’t be ignored or passed up

12. Takeaways

13. The take homes
C3S would like to be a good global player and use WSI system. To do so requires …
Mechanism to work with members to ensure consistency
The right to mint ids if needed
An agreement that C3S can add metadata to Oscar Surface database
The last thing anyone needs is yet another identifier system in use but without solving the above it is inevitable!

14. Source: https://xkcd.com/927/

15. The fundamental record is forever
If we muck up stewardship of the fundamental record, it and the associated knowledge disappears forever.
Robust international sustained stewardship program required of which WSI can be a key component
C3S brings resource that cannot be ignored
If WSI is to be successful this shall be far from the last 3rd party case to arise, so governance needs revision to cope with 3rd party inputs as a matter of BAU

16. Perhaps contentious final thought
Leaving the WSI governance as it stands almost guarantees that it shall be globally incomplete, and that this incompleteness will mirror national capabilities / competence and engagement. Without solving the governance issue, and without actively working with international repository activities to be populated, WSI will never reach their full potential for supporting the provision of services by members.