ICA&D – The platform to collate meteorological datasets and provide climate services.

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. The data can be 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 and services—particularly for areas which are the most vulnerable. Coordination between countries is vital, since weather and climate phenomena often span country borders.

To contribute to filling this gap, International Climate Assessment & Dataset (ICA&D), with support from the EU-funded ClimSA Programme, is being extended to the climate-vulnerable areas of the Caribbean, the Pacific and in 5 sub-regions in Africa. ICA&D will be managed in each ClimSA sub-region by a WMO Regional Climate Centre (RCC)/proposed RCC. ICA&D stores for each sub-region validated daily precipitation and temperature series collected from the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) in that region. It provides an accessible, web-based mean to collect, prepare, quality control, and analyze the meteorological data. The ICA&D workflow 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 RCC and implemented in Southeast Asia by meteorological service of Indonesia (BMKG).

WMO and KNMI are presently collaborating  to expand ICA&D to two pilot regions, the Caribbean (caribbean.icad-wmo.org) and West-Africa (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, 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 each NMHS remain restricted while allowing derived indices to be accessed by the public. With support from ClimSA, WMO and KNMI are facilitating the discussion on sharing meteorological observations.