Web Expert Team 2.2 on Climate Monitoring including use of Satellite & Marine Data & Products

Rationale and background

Long-period and high-quality climatic instrumental time series are essential for the production of reliable assessments of the global climate system with a view to better understand, detect, predict and respond to global climate variability and change. Such key datasets are not only of immense scientific value, they also ultimately offer political, social and economic advantages, and they are required in order to:

• Place extreme events in a longer-term context allowing, for example, for more accurate assessments of their return periods.
• Enhance our knowledge about instrumentally measured climate variability and change, and the possible factors causing these changes across the region.
• Contribute to the advancement of climate change detection and attribution studies
• Develop climate change scenarios by combining observational climate measurements with projections from Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations.
• Provide input to extended historical reanalysis (i.e. reanalyses prior to 1948)
• Calibrate natural/documentary proxies to extend the known climatic history of a country/region
• Calibrate satellite estimates of surface variables.
• Provide better observational data for the validation of climate model outputs (both RCMs and Global Climate Models [GCMs])
• Perform more robust analyses in climate and applied climatological studies.
• Provide the best regional climate data sets for the use in environmental studies including the real and potential threats that various terrestrial, hydrological and marine ecosystems faces in the changing climate conditions.
• Improve adaptation to climate change impacts, by developing longer series for assessing impact sector models.
• Enhance the scientific contribution in the climate component of large field experiments/programmes.

The Greater Mediterranean Region (GMR) has a very long and rich history in monitoring the atmosphere, going back in time several centuries in some countries and at least to the 19th century across much of the GMR. However, despite the efforts undertaken by some National Meteorological and Hydrological Services and scholars in Data Rescue (DARE) activities aimed at transferring historical long-term climate records from fragile media (paper forms) to new electronic media, accessible digital climate data is still mostly restricted to the second half of the 20th century. Climate data heritage over the GMR is, then, largely underexploited.

This reality is preventing the region from developing more accurate assessments of climate variability and change and its adverse impacts on the socio-ecosystem of the Mediterranean Basin, at the same time it is impeding the development of optimum strategies to mitigate and/or adapt to the current and future adverse impacts of global climate change over the GMR. To address these issues, a MEditerranean Climate DAta REscue (MEDARE) initiative was set up at International Workshop on Rescue and Digitization of Climate Records in the Mediterranean Basin (http://www.omm.urv.cat/Med-DARE), organized by the World Meteorological Organization under its World Climate Data and Monitoring Programme (WMO/WCDMP).