International Digital Archives

There is no point in digitising observations if the resulting digitial data is not itself archived and made available for widespread use. Although the UK has its own archives, most users will look to the regional and global archives instead.

Observations in ICOADS, 1800-2014.

In principle there is a set of global datasets sufficient to be customers for almost all digitised observations:

• Marine observations go to ICOADS
• Sub-daily observations go to the Integrated Surface Database (ISD)
• Daily and monthly averages go to the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN)

In practice these datasets are not well enough supported and resourced to do their jobs adequately, and ISD and ICOADS at least are not currently capable of accepting new digitised observations. There are also regional archives (notably the European Climate Assessment & Dataset project (ECA&D) and its regional spin-offs ), modern-era only datasets like HadISD, and single-variable datasets like the International Surface Pressure DataBank (ISPD) and the International Surface Temperature Initiative. But even collectively these do a poor job of accepting, archiving, and disseminating newly-digitised observations. They lack high-level coordination, and resources.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has recognised the problems in this area and is supporting the construction of a Global Land and Marine Observations Database. We should support this work as much as possible, providing our newly-digitised observations to this datastore, and linking the UK-specific datasets to the international effort.