ICA&D: Climate Services across borders

The International Climate Assessment & Dataset (ICA&D) contributes to the provision of climate services in regions across the world. ICA&D provides both climate data and tools for climate monitoring and is thereby supporting the WMO Regional Climate Centres in carrying-out their mandatory functions.

 In WMO Regional Association VI (Europe and the Middle East), the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D) fulfills this role for the last 25 years and from this the ICA&D concept is derived. ICA&D has been implemented in by the Indonesian meteorological service  as the Southeast Asian Climate Assessment & Dataset (SACA&D) and this implementation has now been operational for nearly 10 years.

ICA&D facilitates the sharing of daily meteorological surface observations from countries in a given region with meteorological services in that region and with scientists worldwide, and deriving climate monitoring products from these observations. Examples are the climate indices of extremes, such as the number of warm or dry days, which can be monitored over time in view of climate change. ICA&D complements national meteorological databases in having only a daily resolution and containing information from multiple countries in the region in the same format.

As part of the EU-funded ClimSA project, ICA&D will be set-up in selected Regional Climate Centres that form part of the WMO institutional network. The first pilot regions are the Caribbean and West-Africa and to these current implementations regional centres in southern Africa, eastern Africa and the Pacific will be added. In this presentation an update of the progress is given and an overview of the functions of ICA&D is provided.