Abstract
Climate services are becoming the backbone to translate climate knowledge, data & information into climate-informed decision-making at all levels, from public administrations to business operators. It is essential to assess the technical and scientific quality of the provided climate data and information products, including their value to users, to establish the relation of trust between providers of climate data and information and various downstream users. The climate data and information products (i.e., from satellite, in-situ and reanalysis) shall be fully traceable, adequately documented and uncertainty quantified and can provide sufficient guidance for users to address their specific needs and feedbacks. This paper discusses details on how to apply the quality assurance framework to deliver timely assessments of the quality and usability of Essential Climate Variable (ECV) products. It identifies an overarching structure for the quality assessment of single product ECVs (i.e., consists of only one single variable), multi-product ECVs (i.e., more than one single parameter), thematic products (i.e., water, energy and carbon cycles), as well as the usability assessment. To support a traceable climate service, other than rigorously evaluating the technical and scientific quality of ECV products, which represent the upstream of climate services, how the uncertainty propagates into the resulting benefit (utility) for the users of the climate service needs to be detailed.
Highlights
Climate services, emerging from a process of transforming climate science into bespoke information products and decision-support for society, have been mainstreamed with significant initiatives at the global scale [1,2], regionally in Europe (e.g. Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), ClimateKIC, or Climate-Adapt portal), and nationally through the emergence of national climate service centers [3]
It starts from the Single Product Assessment, which will be the foundation to recommend inclusion, conditional inclusion or exclusion of Essential Climate Variable (ECV) products for serving decision making based on the needs of the downstream users
The Usability Assessment is to detail what the essential metadata is for the end-user, how the prospective end-user can benefit from the metadata, and, given these insights, provide feedbacks to climate services providers on the presentation and validation of metadata, as well as to specify links between quality features of ECV products and the resulting benefit for the users
Summary
Climate services, emerging from a process of transforming climate science into bespoke information products and decision-support for society, have been mainstreamed with significant initiatives at the global scale (e.g., the Global Framework for Climate Services) [1,2], regionally in Europe (e.g. Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), ClimateKIC, or Climate-Adapt portal), and nationally through the emergence of national climate service centers [3]. It starts from the Single Product Assessment, which will be the foundation to recommend inclusion, conditional inclusion or exclusion of ECV products for serving decision making based on the needs of the downstream users. With the foregoing assessments, the quality information of ECV products (i.e., single-, multi-, and thematic-products) will provide essential meta-information on datasets to inform potential users and enable the comparison of datasets, to evaluate the fitness-for-purpose (F4P) for the envisaged use cases. The Usability Assessment is to detail what the essential metadata is for the end-user, how the prospective end-user can benefit from the metadata, and, given these insights, provide feedbacks to climate services providers on the presentation and validation of metadata, as well as to specify links between quality features of ECV products and the resulting benefit (utility) for the users
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