Date and Time

28 September 12:00-14:00 UTC (14:00-16:00 Geneva)

Venue

Telecon

Invitees / Participants (x)

• Jörg Klausen (@joergklausen, chair) (x)
• Claudia Volosciuk (WMO) (x)
• Kjetil Tørseth (x)
• Debra Kollonige (x)
• Keiichi Sato (x)
• Markus Fiebig (x)
• Jeannette Wild (x)
• Eduardo Landulfo (x)
• Øystein Godøy (x)
• Judd Welton (@ejwelton) (x)
• Gao Chen
• Tom Kralidis
• Christopher Lehmann
• Dietrich Feist
• Anatoly V Tsvetkoc
• Alex Vermeulen
• Andreas Petzold
• Bill Sukloff ([email protected]), CAPMON - Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)
• Melissa Puchalski ([email protected], CASTNET Clean Air Status and Trends Network, https://www.epa.gov/castnet)
• Martin Schultz
• Terry Nakajima ([email protected]; [email protected]), SKYNET
• Bret Schichtel, [email protected], IMPROVE)
• Ryan Stauffer
• Damien Boulanger
• Martine de Mazière
• Valérie Thouret
• Tomoaki Nishizawa (SKYNET)

Excused

• Atsuya Kinoshita
• Stoyka Netcheva (@Netcheva, WMO)

Agenda

Supporting slide deck

1. Welcome, acceptance of agenda (5')
2. Acceptance of minutes of previous meeting (5')
3. Review conclusions from GAW Quadrennial Symposium
4. Take stock of progress made during the summer on linking your various data centers with GAWSIS-OSCAR/Surface
5. Clarify the process of generating WIGOS Station Identifiers
6. Any other subjects announced

Minutes

1. Welcome, acceptance of agenda

Agenda accepted.

JK: The next WMO bulletin will be dedicated to Data. An article titled “The benefits of atmospheric composition monitoring” described the role, importance, goals and challenges relevant to atmospheric composition had been drafted and will be soon published. It includes the goal and also the angle of the international data exchange. This article gives a very nice overview of what data management in GAW is about. Thank you Claudia for working on this.

The next piece of information is for the WMO expert team on metadata, which, is installed under the Inf Commission which is responsible for all observation systems. ET- metadata is composed of two task teams. One on WIS metadata and the other one on the WIGOS metadata. The chair of this expert team is Tom Kralidis. He has arranged a meeting with the Wiki media foundation who is interested in interacting with WMO and raising both of the profiles of course of Wikimedia, but also the profile of and helping WMO to raise visibility and provide also access to data and information about data in the bigger context of HML. One meeting had been held. Now a project charter is being constructed. We can put the link in GitHub page. The team here is invited to contribute also from this task team because there is a large interest in atmospheric composition data.

2. Acceptance of minutes of previous meeting The second item on the agenda is to accept the minutes of the last Meeting. In absence of any comments they are accepted. Please have a look. These are quite extensive and they provide also some guidance for our future thinking.

3. Review conclusions from GAW Quadrennial Symposium

GAW symposium was overall successful. We had a contribution to the session on enabling exchange and adequate use of data for atmospheric research. It was rather well perceived. The objective laid out in the workshop discussion didn't make it to any really in-depth and meaningful discussion in the end and not to the point where we could draw any substantial conclusions. The general conclusion that further harmonization is welcomed, but we didn't receive any guidance from above, from any governing body. It's still true that WMO expects guidance from us and the rightfully so because we are an expert team. It is our role to come up with proposals for issues and topics that we see are important in the context of GAW data management, but also of data management and in relationship to WMO. OG: GAW currently does not have a forum where for example, the stations can interact with GAW.

Markus Fiebig: There's a mill that used to be part of what the SAGs were doing. Now that the terms of reference of the instruments part has been taken out. For example, we as data center or as the calibration centers have any news, for example, any updates on the data reporting routine so we currently don't have any forum where we could reach to say. There one or two representatives in the SAGs, who are directly involved with stations. The other SAG members have been usually users or they are at a higher level in the administration and they're not directly concerned any more, with the station operation.

More thinking about this idea for a forum once or twice per year where station operators could tune in and demand, receive news about, what's possible, what's new, calibrations for the instruments, or simply receiving news about what are the next calibration workshops for the instruments when are the next courses, which are relevant for them.

The new team led by Herman Smith, also has an extended team where the central facilities are part of. So probably that could that channel.

JK: Claudia you can feed this back into your discussions internally and raise it even to the level of the SSC, because ultimately they should be concerned also with the best organization of the program. At least something online as you want to have a forum where people can ask questions. You can also file this, for example, under capacity building.

JK: In the Oscar world guided by WMO, there is such a forum with a monthly presentations. Timo is in charge of organizing this and I think it's quite appreciated by the community (the metrological community). Such a forum for GAW might indeed be quite useful. The question is who is organizing it - a good way of talking about the things that were mentioned, collaboration, even instrument operation, but also it could help us to reach out and the data centers

CV: GAW Secretariat is working on making all of the material from Symposium available online soon. And at the same time, we will send out a survey with more in-depth questions for the next implementation plan.

4. Take stock of progress made during the summer on linking your data centers with GAWSIS-OSCAR/Surface

Follow up on the plan each center made a commitment to work on for the year in January or February. Oscar database was analysed and did not show any progress on the actual XML file upload which is the basis for this adventure. The system allows to see the status for where either there was a complete success with the upload of XML or a valid XML with some warning and then if anything was rejected or in process or invalid. The system indicated nothing was done from GAW and from the data centers. Discussion on what the issues, plans, progress were followed. Pointed out was that Meteo Swiss can help to some limited extent, but when contacted with specific questions and when attempts are done.

WDCRG issue is still vocabulary, but we are working on that. I think there's progress in reach. MPLNET experiences even more vocabulary issues which are now worked on in another group.

Debra on SHADOZ - an activity that goes forwards for having accurate metadata and XML file information is we set up in regional states virtual meetings all summer long to interact with the stations. This meeting gave them the opportunity to let us know any changes, discuss with them new data, quality assurance activities. We actually have a new report on some principles and standard operating procedures involved with that which will be published by WMO soon. I was able to update information for the metadata files of these stations. I have started to create examples for each station and I should be able to start uploading in OSCAR in the next month at least test uploading to see if what I have works successful.

Machine user registering is required and if assistance is needed it could be provided by OSCAR Team and Joerg. Those should be contacted individually. Sample code and phyton tools are available on GitHub and can be used to produce XML files and then XML files can be uploaded on GitHub and serve others to speed up the process of automating this. The path to achieve our goal is to work. Large majority of the variables exists and the information that is interesting for the users of GAWSIS and Oscar can be transmitted with the current metadata model. This code list exists, in GitHub. And then if change is needed the amendment process takes a long time. Now for the vocabularies that exist, the Path is to pass the existing XML files and validate against the existing schema. This could be used to upload what you can upload. If the tools/files are available set them up to produce these files for the variables where mapping is already possible. This could generate 70% necessary information. For the ones where the mapping is not yet possible, will be done as soon as the mapping becomes available. Changes in application, migration, approaches when variables are not existing or during migration and new schema is developed and implemented were disused.

Jeanette needs clarity on what is required - what technical skills, what is the process, how, what accounts are needed, what type of person should have the accounts. Joerg will have bilateral discussion to give necessary information after the meeting.

Second bilateral meeting to be scheduled by Keiiji to resolve his issues and answer questions.

Eduardo invited Joerg to present WIGOS standard at their committee meeting in more than one month from now.

5. Clarify the process of generating WIGOS Station Identifiers

JK: The WMO secretariat and the commissions had worked on an update of the WIGOS guide to the WMO which is an official document. It's a document that is approved by the commission and goes to the WMO library. In chapter 10.3 GAW was acknowledged as a program that has authority to manage their own WIGOS IDs in Oscar and GAWSIS. GAW has the authority to mint WIGOS IDs. If the members themselves don't register their stations, then GAW can do it and the affiliated programs of GAW can do that. And the GAW IDs, which are a bit like an IP address, are globally unique. Joerg presented what components of WIGOS ID are.

JK provided clarification on question if GAW IDs are required for stations in WDC. GAW ID on stations is not necessary for reporting data. For your stations, you cannot get a GAW ID unless the station is an official GAW station which requires According to GAW IP 2016-23: for Global (Measure at least two variables in at least three of the six GAW focal areas with the full implementation of GAW’s Quality Assurance system (Box 7.1 (A)).), for Regional (There is a commitment by the responsible agency to long-term observations of at least two variables in at least one GAW focal areas (ozone, aerosols, greenhouse gases, reactive gases, UV radiation, precipitation chemistry/total deposition), for Mobile (Mobile station is the station that uses moving platforms to perform atmospheric composition observations (aircraft, ship, train etc), for Local (Local stations reflect the growing interest in conducting research and supporting services related to urban environments, and in other locations impacted by nearby emissions (e.g. from biomass burning). GAW local stations are to satisfy the same requirements as for regional stations except for the sitting requirement.). In short at least two variables in at least one GAW focal areas must be measured to be GAW station. If it measures one variable it can not be GAW station and can work with WIGOS ID. If it's an affiliated station, you're not supposed to have a GAW ID, but you will need a WIGOS ID and it is the ID you can get. You have to know this because you, if you are the program manager you are the only one who should have an interest in registering new stations and issuing it. They are, listed in the new version of this guide to the WMO integrated global observing system.

JW: How is it when a dataset is belonging to several of these programs? So a station that can have, it can be both

JK: You can mint a WIGOS ID, for each of these programs for the same station. If you see a need to do that, you can, the system allows you to do that.

A station can have several WIGOS IDs but it's not really helpful. It doesn't provide added value. So the first time you register a station, you will register it for a specific purpose. And then, that's the moment when you have to create a MPL's ID, because otherwise you cannot register it. If, the member country doesn't want to do it then the data center will have to do it otherwise it's not possible to share information about this station. Ideally a member registers a station and then the member will use not 20,008 as an issue, but they will use their assigned ISO country code. In which case, there is no problem. There is a WIGOS ID. You can use it to map it to metadata and information. We need to step back from the idea that the WIGOS ID carries meaning, WIGOS ID should not be interpreted. It should be globally unique. That's the only requirement for reporting. I don't think for GAW any of the networks have, registered stations yet. The members of WMO are the countries, the countries are represented by their permanent representatives. And some of these permanent representatives are more on a technical level. If a station is already registered in Oscar, then it has, ID in which case you use it and you don't create a new one because those IDs are just identify as they should not be interpreted. If you want to filter in OSCAR research for a certain program you need to build tool, to use these particular elements in the code lists that exist and Oscar API, allows you to do this. There is an OEI PMH endpoint that is available, where all of the metadata contained in Oscar are XML and coded and available for harvesting. So you can build your tooling also around that.

KT: For the station which is also registered at GAW regional and GAW global what code should be assigned?

JK: You should use the existing codes and in the metadata, when you describe the observations, you will make this link to the network by assigning a program affiliation to this observation. It's not the right that ID is used to make this link. One useful way of looking at it is to view it as a tree with, stem and then branches and the stem or the tree itself, has a WIGOS side. And then each branch describes, an observation, which essentially is an observed variable.

Related to this tree and, with a certain geometry let's take ozone as an example, we have, an in-situ ozone measurement two meters above ground. That's a point measurement. It's a time series. It is made at a particular station. So that's an observation. You might also have some, LIDAR which makes a profile or a total column observation of the same variable ozone. Those are two different observations made at the same station. So two different branches of the same tree. They have the same ID but one of them may be, you know, affiliated, to the surface observation affiliated to one network or maybe to both surface and remote. You have to, affiliate an observation with the program. The idea being that, an observation should serve at least one particular purpose, and it should serve a particular program one or more. So that's the way you bring in the program affiliation.

End of meeting. Next meeting on 18 November 2021.