World Climate Data and Monitoring Programme

Development of Climate Databases Project

This activity, although not under this specific name of the current project, has been ongoing since before the inception of WMO in 1950, notably through the publication of climatological standard normals, which are defined as "averages of climatological data for consecutive periods of 30 years". Those for 1931-1960 were published by WMO in 1962 to be followed by an enlarged edition in 1971. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in the USA prepared the 1961 - 1990 normals which were published by WMO in 1996, followed by an electronic edition on CD-ROM from NCDC in 1998. Similarly, WMO collaborates with WDC-A in the publishing of the World Weather Records (WWR) which contain monthly and annual means or totals for each year of a decade, and the corresponding decadal (10-year) averages of pressure, temperature and precipitation. WWRs have been routinely published in regional volumes since the 1920s. The last of the five volumes for the decade 1981-1990 was published late in 1999.

NCDC, through its affiliation with the World Data Center-A (WDC-A) for Meteorology, has been involved in developing and maintaining a number of global databases which contribute significantly to the objectives of this project.

The World Data Center system

The International Council for Science (ICSU) World Data Center (WDC) system works to guarantee access to solar, geophysical and related environmental data. It serves the whole scientific community by assembling, scrutinizing, organizing and disseminating data and information. The System was created over forty years ago to meet the needs of scientists involved in the International Geophysical Year. Since that time, it has provided geophysical and solar data and information to scientists in all countries. WMO is actively involved in the provision of data to a number of these ICSU Centers and there are a number of associated centers operated directly through WMO. Those centers most relevant to the users of traditional climate data are WDC-A and WDC-B for Meteorology, the WMO World Data Center for Global Precipitation and the WMO Global Runoff Data Center. It is worth noting that there are differences in data access policy for ICSU and WMO centers. ICSU data centers will exchange data amongst themselves without charge and will provide data to scientists in any country free of charge. WMO data centers must abide by a data exchange resolution that allows for some data or products to be placed in the WDCs which may have conditions attached to their use as provided for in Resolution 40 of the 12th World Meteorological Congress.

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