Sharing climate data through ICA&D

Historical climate data is fundamental for understanding local climate trends and extremes and evaluating the impact of climate change on agriculture, food security and water resources. In addition, the data is  used for implementing adaptation measures for protecting lives and adapting socio-economic sectors to the changing climate conditions. While global climate trends can already be assessed with available data, regional data disparities result in blind-spots for climate change assessments—particularly for areas which are the most vulnerable.

To contribute to filling this gap, the International Climate Assessment & Dataset (ICA&D) has been extended to the climate-vulnerable areas of the Caribbean, the Pacific and in 5 sub-regions in Africa. ICA&D provides an accessible, web-based system to collect, prepare, quality control, and analyze basic climatological data with daily resolution. The system was developed over 25 years ago by the Meteorological Service of the Netherlands (KNMI) as the backbone of the European WMO data-node of the Regional Climate Centre (https://www.ecad.eu/) and implemented in Southeast Asia by meteorological service of Indonesia (BMKG). Now, with support from the EU-funded ClimSA project, under which WMO is implementing a €5.5 million grant, ICA&D will be further extended and run by Regional Climate Centers assigned and supported by WMO.

WMO and KNMI collaborated in 2022 through CLIMSA project to expand ICA&D to two pilot regions, the Caribbean and West-Africa on https://caribbean.icad-wmo.org/ and http://west-africa.icad-wmo.org/. The collaboration has led to setting up new websites which are designed to be user friendly and highly cyber secure. The websites, one for each region, consist of information platforms, including a geographical map with the locations of the stations’ datasets, and a feature to quickly plot timeseries from derived data and an e-learning module on the website’s functions. The data sharing policy ensures that access to raw observational data from National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) remain restricted while allowing derived indices to be accessed by the public. Indices alone can monitor critical areas and impacts of climate change, such as the temperature of the warmest night of the year, the subsequent impact on health and  induced excess of mortality.