Facilitating data rescue initiatives

Knowledge about past climate and extreme weather events is an essential part of understanding future climate change and variability. KNMI is involved in multiple data rescue efforts to uncover the past, which we would like to highlight.   

KNMI manages and maintains the web-based portal (https://datarescue.climate.copernicus.eu) with practical information, current data rescue (DARE) projects and metadata inventories that originated from initiatives of both the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). News items with developments from the community are published on this portal on a bi-monthly basis. One of the main features is the opportunity to highlight your data rescue project. By making your efforts known and publicly available, chances are decreased that the same data is rescued twice by other groups. Additionally, we encourage owners of rescued data to share this in a global repository, such as the C3S Global Land And Marine Observations Database (GLAMOD), so that the valuable data will not get lost again and is made available for use in e.g. the ERA6 reanalysis.  

The C3S Data rescue work package contributes and monitors efforts using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to aid data rescue efforts. The development of a data rescue image repository by C3S is in line with future methods to retrieve valuable meteorological data from scanned paper records with OCR.  

Within the context of the International Panel on Deltas, Coastal areas, and Islands (IPDC) project, KNMI will advise the National Meteorological Services (NMSs) on the islands of Aruba, Curacao, and St. Maarten on digitization efforts.