Request for support sent from World Meteorological Organization to National Met Services

Earlier this month a letter was circulated from WMO on behalf of the Director General to the Permanent Representatives of its member services (such as NOAA, Met Office, KNMI, Meteo France, BoM, CMA etc.). This letter is a result of discussions at the meeting of the Global Climate Observing System's Atmospheric Observations Panel for Climate in its session earlier this year (report here) and facilitated by GCOS. The letter focusses upon databank aspects of the Initiative. Specifically it asks for help in:

• Confirming the holdings for stations under the auspices of the national service;
• Sharing any metadata that is associated with these holdings;
• Help in sharing any other national data either collected by the national service or not held directly by the national service; and
• Making available any parallel measurement holdings undertaken by the service as part of their network operations to manage / understand change.

As the letter is an official letter it has been translated into several additional languages. These are currently available online (third party hosted so no guarantee of perpetuity availability clearly). Versions are available in English, French, Russian, Spanish and Arabic.To my knowledge although clearly addressed to the national PRs there is no bona fide restriction on their use in support of appropriate requests through other channels. Clearly any reuse should be appropriate and have a clear cover letter to distinguish that it is supporting material.

While we are discussing the databank ... we are now very much in the final stretch of the development of a stable release. The methods paper has been accepted and as soon as it is available in AOP (probably in the next week or two) we will announce so here. In the meantime i's are being dotted and t's crossed to enable us to go out of beta to a release candidate version concurrent with the paper appearance. Barring discovery of major issues in process forensics the release candidate will become version 1 as soon as due processes have been undertaken.