Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Welcome to the Databank working group

As Chair of the Databank working group I welcome you to our new blog. This provides a venue for sharing ideas associated with development of the global surface databank. Our near-term focus is on establishing a databank of surface temperature data at daily and monthly timescales. Longer term we intend to expand this to include sub-daily observations of temperature and other variables. A pilot temperature databank of several sources is available at http://www.gosic.org/GLOBAL_SURFACE_DATABANK/GBD.html . Suggestions regarding new data sources, formatting, and access are welcome and encouraged. This working group is supported by a task team on data rescue and another on data provenance and version control.

Data sources

We welcome suggestions as to possible data sources both in digital format and also image only or hardcopy only. Please feel free to make suggestions in the comments. Sources must be available for usage without restriction to be incorporated within the databank and ideally have a provenance trail - where possible back to the original measurement through an unbroken chain.

Blog rationale

This is a blog to discuss work in progress towards a global surface databank of historical meteorological observations. It is intended for discussion primarily by working group members. Public comments are permitted but are moderated and moderation will not be instantaneous.