C3S 311a Lot 1

This project brings together fourteen partners in a consortium led by the Met Office to provide a service to facilitate climate data rescue that builds upon existing WMO International Data Rescue activities. The service will run an online repository (portal and registry) of information about past, current and planned climate data rescue, provide a wide range of data rescue tools and run capacity building workshops. The consortium has existing relationships and experience of working with ACRE (Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth). The service builds upon the WMO I-DARE portal and will provide climate observations to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) climate data store.

A prototype portal will be running by December 2017 and will be operational by 2019. Capacity Building workshops will be hosted during 2017 and 2019 in two key locations bringing together consortium partners and additional participants from the surrounding regions to encourage the development of support networks.

The service will develop and maintain the technical support services needed by users to facilitate all steps of the data rescue procedure; from consolidating paper archives to imaging data formatting and quality control, whilst piloting the use of new techniques and approaches to data digitisation. In addition to specific support for the tools, users of the data rescue process can strongly benefit from best practice guidelines. This is an excellent way to share expert experience in a targeted but accessible way. Best practice guidelines will be developed for all steps of the data rescue process, including minimum standards for metadata and images to be stored in national archives, such that these images remain useful. The service will produce annual assessments of the state of data rescue supplying information about needs, gaps and priorities.

The project has identified three high priority regions for financial support to facilitate data rescue work as part of the C3S Data Rescue Service. These regional projects are ACRE Antarctica, ACRE South Africa and ACRE Argentina. Although already existing as projects under the ACRE umbrella these projects require substantial funding and stand to produce significant value in terms of new data over time periods and regions previously lacking in observations.