Comments on Chapter 3: Climate Quality Observations, Monitoring, and
Data Management

There are many strengths in this strategic plan for the management of
climate data and observations. It emphasizes 1) life-cycle data
management practices; the importance of obtaining and maintaining
decades-long time series of data; 3) the provision of widespread and
open access to climate data by both scientists and policy makers; 4) the
maintenance of global monitoring systems; and 5) support for data
processing. These are all important.

There are three areas in the plan, however, that still need to be
addressed. First, despite the frequent reiteration of the importance of
making climate data accessible to policy and decision makers, this
strategic plan is too narrowly focused on data needs for scientific
research and for the reduction of scientific uncertainty. Although one
of the strengths of the report is its recognition that climate change
data and information are needed for management, policy, and decision
making as well as for science, the data needs of applied, non-scientific
users are ignored. Moreover, the reduction of scientific uncertainty can
be used to drive data collection, but should not eclipse the equally
important policy and management need of identifying both short term and
long term trends in climate---from whatever cause.

A strategic plan will never be able to anticipate all the data and
information needs of future research and policy. What it should do,
however, is establish an open and ongoing process that will identify
data and information requirements as they evolve and change. The process
should encompass data users among both research scientists and managers
and policy makers, recognizing that although there will be areas of
overlap between the two groups, there will also be some data needs that
are unique to each.

Second, data rescue and reconstruction of time series, recommended in
the strategic plan, are difficult research tasks. Time series data are
essential for understanding climate change, and this plan not only
recognizes their importance but also recommends data rescue (which it
also calls data archeology) as a means of constructing such time series
post hoc. Yet data obtained after the fact are likely to be incomplete
or to be spatially or temporally patchy. Missing values must be
estimated. There may be a need to splice disparate data series. These
are research tasks that will require a deep understanding of the
properties of the data and the underlying phenomena that are being
monitored. Data rescue may also require the development of surrogate
measures. The development of new measures---indirect measures---is
implied in this strategic plan, but is not discussed.

New types of data will be needed to understand human impacts and
anthropogenic forcing. The strategic plan calls for "comprehensive
documentation about the full spectrum of climate forcings, feedbacks,
and responses, especially over the past century when human influences
have been most pronounced" (p. 27, lines 29-30). Despite this assertion,
however, there is little discussion in the plan of the socioeconomic,
institutional, or behavioral data needed to understand either the
forcing functions or the impacts of climate variability and change.
Greater attention should be given to the issue of how to identify and
obtain these data.

Third, the requirements of the data and information system are not
spelled out in the plan. The strategic plan speaks of life cycle
management without explaining what this means, either now or in the
future. At a minimum, life cycle management will require long term,
permanent archives that are able to ensure that data from climate change
observations and monitoring systems are not lost through technical
obsolescence in the storage, documentation, or dissemination media. It
requires technological flexibility and an active advisory structure that
can articulate the changing data and information needs of science on the
one hand and policy, management, and decision-making on the other.