New technology has provided new opportunities to collect, process, control, archive, analyse and disseminate climate data. Automated observations bring benefits in terms of data coverage but also bring challenges to maintain quality and homogeneity in climate time series. Monitoring of climate also requires the development of long-term homogeneous historic records, which are essential to detect, model and assess climate variability and change and its associated impacts on the socio-ecosystem. The development of such long instrumental records is also of paramount importance to adequately address national policies and strategies for minimising and adapting to climate change impacts, at the same time it is essential that these data are made available digitally. These issues will be addressed in this session, in terms of observational practices, data arrangements, mapping / other visualisation techniques and dissemination methods needed to monitor climate change. This session will also encompass the requirements of data users - government, industry, media and the general public. Contributions on the international collaboration on these issues and on policies for dissemination of climate data are particularly welcomed.

Major topics are:
• Methods of observation (land, sea and upper air) - Assimilation of data from new instruments and technologies, GCOS climate monitoring principles, combination of ground based and remote sensing data
• Techniques and procedures for undertaking data rescue (DARE) activities – from locating old records to transfer them into digital form
• Processing of climate data – quality control, archiving, metadata, digitising of old instrumental records
• Homogenisation of time series – detection and adjustment methodologies (incl. daily values and extremes), evaluation of methods, applications to large datasets
• Mapping of essential climate elements and derived variables for special applications – spatial interpolation in complex topography, gridding techniques, climate maps of normals, extremes and trends
• User oriented applications – extreme value analysis, long-term trends, extreme weather (heat waves, heavy rainfalls, droughts, wind storms), energy (hydropower production, wind energy, consumption of energy for heating and cooling), polar and maritime datasets, derived climate indices
• Dissemination of climate data and information – Internet, web-technologies, portals for climate information, exchange of climate data (UNIDART), available national and international climate datasets (observational and gridded)
- Data policy - national/international obligations (EC, WMO, ECOMET, INSPIRE).
- Climate change and society