The following is a distillation of a GCOS data management process based on the work of GCOS Panels (primarily AOPC). It includes monitoring the availability of data, its quality control, the analysis of the data set (and product development) and archiving of the final data sets.
1. GCOS Monitoring Centre
The tasks of a GCOS Monitoring Centre are to:
Monitor the availability, timelines and completeness of the incoming data/messages received via GTS or other communication medium to improve the performance of the GCOS Network;
Perform basic quality control and assurance procedures for the incoming data (and metadata) to obtain high quality and ensure completeness of the data set; and
Make quality-controlled data available to the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) and World Data Centres (WDCs) and others for their use in a variety of climatic change assessment products.
2. GCOS Analysis Centre
A GCOS Analysis Centre will provide a higher level quality control of both the daily and monthly GCOS network data.
For the daily data, this will include updating and quality controlling the daily data, applying bias corrections to the daily data, calculating monthly statistics (MONADS) from daily data; and providing daily and monthly data to users;
For the monthly data, this will include analyzing the monthly data; improving bias adjustments to monthly data and the monthly station data base, creating global and regional monthly statistics; and developing and providing grid products with reduced biases; and
Also a centre will provide products to users, improve the meta data, and report on historical and meta data reception.
3. GCOS Archiving Centre
A GCOS Archiving Centre should coincide with a World Data Centre (WDC) or recognized, established data centre, if possible.
A GCOS Archiving Centre will archive both the monthly and the daily data in delayed-mode as well as historical data for each station;
Historic monthly data in the WDC will come from either data available at WDCs, e.g., from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), from quality-controlled data available at the Monitoring Centres (MCs), or from data submitted, upon request, by national centres (e.g., NMHSs) and available digitally and updated on a routine basis. (Access in near real-time to the time series of historic monthly data is absolutely necessary/highly desirable for quality control.); and
the daily historical data is important to assess better the impact of extreme events and its relation to climate change.
