A better way to find tailored climate data

“When GCOS first introduced its ECVs in 2003, these variables were mainly thought for one application – to track climate change,” said Roebeling.

“But things have changed since then. Nowadays, tracking climate change is only one of many climate applications. There are services determining extreme precipitation events, flooding warnings, changes in forests, fires, among others. Evidently, depending on the application, these services look for different types of data. For example, water management institutes in the Netherlands want to anticipate future changes – how must buffer zones be expanded or dikes be raised to cope with increasingly extreme precipitation?”

Because of these varying needs, a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer effective. As a result, GCOS tasked the international climate community with developing a broader approach covering requirements for multiple applications. In their article, Roebeling and co-authors devised a systematic method for defining the requirements to be met by products of essential climate variables, in order to provide users with an objective way of finding climate data tailored to specific climate applications. Comprising a series of mathematical equations, this method takes the relevant climate application as a starting point while taking into account the natural variability of a climate variable in space and time, as well as the specification and uncertainties in observational data.