The WMO Commission for Climatology (CCl) recently recommended the establishment of a High Quality Global Data Management Framework for Climate which was endorsed by the WMO Executive Council in June. An ad-hoc group of experts from various disciplines was then formed to develop an approach for endorsing and cataloguing trusted data sets for informing on key climate indicators. The Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) provides a list of key climate variables suitable for this assessment.
A Stewardship Maturity Matrix for Climate Data (SMM-CD) is now being implemented as an emerging tool for climate data management standards focusing primarily on quality management and governance in addition to the GCOS climate dataset reviewing process. The SMM-CD will enable data providers to check and rate their datasets based on an internationally validated data stewardship approach before being reviewed by WMO. This process will help WMO in evaluating the stewardship maturity of the data which are submitted for inclusion in the WMO Data Catalogue. The maturity assessment will start with global datasets and is expected to be extended to regional and national datasets a few years after the operationalization of the process at the global level. This will allow consistent classification of data references across these three levels. The catalogue will inform users on the various aspects of the data and those included in the catalogue will be made accessible in a prominent position through the WMO Information System (WIS) and internet search engines.
