NOTES FROM THE FOURTH FORMAL COORDINATED ENERGY AND WATER-CYCLEOBSERVATIONS PROJECT (CEOP) TELECONFERENCE ON ASIA-PACIFIC-AUSTRALIAREGIONAL HYDROCLIMATE PROJECTS AND REFERENCE SITE ISSUES HELD ON
21 OCTOBER 2009
FINAL DRAFT, 2 December 20091.

INTRODUCTION

The 4th Asia-Pacific-Australia RHP and Reference Sites Teleconference related to the
Coordinated Energy and Water-Cycle Observations Project (CEOP) took place on Wednesday 21
October 2009 at 05:00 UTC.
The issues that were discussed on the subject conference call included:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)

rd

Results from the 3 CEOP Annual Meeting at Melbourne, Australia from 19-21 August 2009;
Current status of the CEOP Reference Site Data Archive with focus on the sites located in the AsiaPacific Australia (CEOP_AP) region;
CEOP_AP Reference Sites status and issues.

Participants
The participants were:
1. Toshio Koike (Japan, CEOP Co-Chair)
2. Katsunori Tamagawa (Japan, CEOP Asia Reference Site Data Manager)
3. Wu Zhang (China, Lanzhou site representative)
4. Hironori Yabuki (Japan, Eastern Siberian Tundra, Eastern Siberian Taiga, Mongol Arvayheer, Mongol
Nalaikh sites representative)
5. Hideyuki Kamimera (Japan, Central Vietnam site and Western Indonesia sites representative)
6. Manabu D. Yamanaka (Japan, Western Indonesia, Central Indonesia, Eastern Indonesia, NorthernIndonesia, and Southern Indonesia site representative)
7. Steve Williams (USA, Data WG Co-Chair)
8. Elisa Vuillermoz (Italy, Himalayas/Karakorum/Alps/Apennines site representative-for Gianni Tartari)
9. Rui Jin (China, Heihe River Basin site representatives)
10. Tetsu Ohta (Japan, CEOP Asia Reference Site Data Manager
11. Huimin Lei (China, Downstream of the Yellow River site representative)
12. Hirohiko Ishikawa (Japan, Tibet site representative)
13. Xin Li (China, Heihe River Basin site representative)
14. Akiko Goda (Japan, CEOP Administrative Manager)
15. Sam Benedict (Japan, CEOP International Coordination Function)
16. Petra Koudelova (Japan, CEOP International Coordination Function)
Could Not Participate
1. Ichirow Kaihotsu (Japan, Mongolia site representative)
2. Masatoshi Aoki (Japan, Chao-Phraya River, North-East Thailand sites representative)
3. Shigenori Haginoya (Japan, Tibet site representatives)
4. Tetsuo Ohata (Japan, Eastern Siberian Tundra, Eastern Siberian Taiga, Mongol Arvayheer, Mongol
Nalaikh sites representative)
5. Jun Matsumoto (Japan, Northeast Bangladesh site and Central Vietnam site representative)
6. Ming-Cheng Yen (Taiwan, Northern South China Sea - Southern Japan site representative)
7. Gombo Davaa (Mongolia, Northern Mongolia site and Mongolia site representative)
8. Ryuichi Shirooka (Japan, Western Pacific Ocean site representative)
9. Jianping Huang (China, Lanzhou site representative)

10. Dawen Yang (China, Downstream of the Yellow River site representative)
11. Shigenori Haginoya (Japan, Tibet site representatives)
12. Jun-Ichi Hamada (Japan, Western Indonesia, Central Indonesia, Eastern Indonesia, NorthernIndonesia, Southern Indonesia sites representative)
13. Liu Huizhi (China, Tongyu site representative)
14. Kenichi Ueno (Japan, Tsukuba site representative)
15. Toru Terao (Japan, Northeast Bangladesh site)
16. Jun Asanuma (Japan, Northern Mongolia site representative)
17. Masatoshi Aoki (Japan, Chao-Phraya River, North-East Thailand sites representative)
18. Feng Jianwu (China, Tongyu site – on behalf of Liu Huizhi)
19. Jason Evans (Australia, MDB Site Representative)
20. Hisayuki Kubota (Japan, Western Pacific Ocean site representative)
21. Fadli Syamsudin (Western Indonesia, Central Indonesia, Eastern Indonesia, Northern Indonesia,
Southern Indonesia sites representative)
22. Tsing-Chang (Mike) Chen (Iowa, Northern South China Sea - Southern Japan site representative)
2.

NEXT CONFERENCE CALLth

The timing of the next, 5 CEOP Asia-Pacific-Australia RHP and Reference Sites
Teleconference will be announced in accordance with a new strategy for the organization of such callsthat will be developed by the end of November 2009. Benedict/Koudelova have the action (A1) toinform the group of the details of the next call nearer to the time of the call and to coordinate theorigination of the call.
3.

CEOP AND CEOP DATA GROUP GENERAL ISSUES

3.1 Opening(3.1a) Koike introduced items of interest to the participants that came out of the Third Annual meeting of
the Coordinated Energy and water cycle Observations Project (CEOP), held from 19-21 August 2009 at
Melbourne, Australia. He noted that the meeting focused on how CEOP is being organized andimplemented. All of the presentation material provided by the participants at the meeting, on the Internet
through the CEOP Home Page at: http://www.ceop.net.
The more detailed science findings and progress toward its main scientific goal to: “understandand predict continental to local-scale hydroclimates for hydrologic applications”, were left for detailed
presentation, review and discussion at the Sixth International Scientific Conference on the Global Energy
and Water Cycle that took place from 24-28 August 2009, at Melbourne, Australia.
(3.1b)The main actions from the meeting included:(i) Action was assigned to the Data Management Working Group to submit a proposal with an
implementation scheme and schedule for defining and organizing a CEOP 10 year dataset.
(ii) The CEOP Co-Chairs agreed to take action to use existing material contained in the CEOP submittal
to the WCRP/GEWEX Legacy document to develop a draft of the initial CEOP Synthesis Document by
the end of October 2009, with submission set for early 2010. However, this action will involve manymembers of the CEOP community before it is submitted for publication.
(iii) Activation of a number of small Task Teams including a Hydrologic Applications Project (HAP) Team,
Land Modeling Team and a Global to Regional Scale Analysis Team.
(iv) It was agreed that CEOP would embrace some of the main tenets of Adaptation to Climate Change(ACC) and would look into ways of contributing to those in a direct manner. Some ideas related to thisconsensus were:(i) Identifying Regional to local Impacts of ACC on the hydroclimate in RHP basins,(ii) Quantifying uncertainty by using CEOP data infrastructure,(iii) Testing models and ACC scenarios by apply WEBS analysis techniques and(iv) Exploiting CEOP/RHP connections to local/basin scale model Centers to assist in ACC work
(3.1c) Koike and Tamagawa reported the outcome of efforts to standardize meta-data anddescriptive documentation utilized in CEOP. Efforts have been underway in CEOP and related
initiatives to attempt to review standard protocols such as ISO-90115 to determine their suitability for
application in CEOP or to introduce modifications to such protocols to provide for a standard to be used in
CEOP for all the documentation and meta-data provided in conjunction with the data sets themselves.
rd
The status of this effort was to be provided as part of Koike’s presentation at the 3 Annual CEOP
Meeting 19-21 August 2009 at Melbourne, Australia. Details will be further described at the time of thenext call.
(3.1d) Tamagawa provided updates from the CEOP_AP data center at Tokyo, Japan in an email prior to
the time of the call. These included that Version 1.10c is a new version of the CEOP raw data uploading
system. On this version 1.10c, the system corresponds to a file format of "MS Excel", "zip" and "rar".
Some issues that were uncovered while previously uploading various raw datasets have also been fixedin this new version.
A revised "Data Upload IF Users Guide" was also provided with this announcement. In it, theupdated points have been highlighted in "yellow". It is felt that this user's guide will help the data
uploading process. The guide will be linked to the top page of the Upload IF at: http://dias-d.tkl.iis.utokyo.ac.jp/CEOP/upload/. All participants have the action A2 to review this newly updated users guideand provide Tamagawa with any questions and comments on the noted updates.
In this context, Williams noted the work at the NCAR/EOL CEOP database with respect to thesite documentation/metadata and agreed to work with Tamagawa on action A3 to ensure that the Tokyo
scheme and the EOL scheme are consistent. Williams noted that the Tokyo group should consider
looking at all the CEOP_AP Reference Site web pages to make sure the EOL database has all the site
documentation currently available, at Tokyo. Of particular importance is information such as the Sitecontact information and correct site location. Tamagawa agreed (action A3a) to send WilIiams any
additional information that is received at Tokyo directly from the Site Managers so that the pages at theEOL database can be as up to date as possible. Tamagawa also agreed to look at the EOL template as
the design of the content in the Tokyo metadata registry tool moves forward. The link provided byWilliams is at: http://www.eol.ucar.edu/projects/ceop/dm/insitu/sites/mahasri/
3.2 On-going Actions for Reference Site Managers and RHP Representatives: Review/Update ofReference Site Meta-data on the CEOP Data Management Web Page.
In the same context with the updating of the CEOP EOL database and the agreement to make it
and the Tokyo database consistent, the Reference site Managers and RHP Representatives wereasked to undertake action A4, namely, to put themselves in the place of users of the CEOP dataarchive and to go on line to review all the documentation for their Reference sites that is available throughthe following web site: http://www.eol.ucar.edu/projects/ceop/dm/insitu/sites/ and to verify that it iscomplete and accurate and report and necessary updates to Tamagawa and Williams.
In particular, it was specified that the Reference site Managers and RHP Representatives
were asked to under take action A4a, namely, to reconfirm the latitude and longitude center locations
for their sites and to provide this information for any new sites for Phase 2. The satellite data available in
the CEOP Satellite data archive and the scene center coordinates during Phase1 for 35 Reference Sites
are available at the following web sites respectively: http://monsoon.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ceop/data/eop1/satellite/doc/; http://monsoon.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ceop/data/eop-1/satellite/doc/ref_site_info_r03.txt;

4.

Status and Update of the CEOP Reference Site data archive: RHP/Reference Site Reports

4.1 Summary status of the reference site archive at NCAR/EOL
Williams introduced the current status of the CEOP reference site data archive, which can be accessedon the Internet at: (http://data.eol.ucar.edu/master_list/?project=CEOP/EOP-3/4.
4.2 Written Site Reports
The Following written reports were sent in by both persons who were not able to participate
directly in the call and by those who did participate in the call but also provided their reports in written
form. The list of participants and of those who could not participate are provided in Item 1. above.
(4.2a) MDB by J. Evans
Evans reported a minor update for the MDB reference sites since the Melbourne meeting. The
flux data from the Tumburrumba reference site is expected to be updated. A new algorithm for gap fillinghas been determined and the data reprocessing was due to have occurred last month. Delivery of thedata has been delayed but should occur soon.
(4.2b) Tsukuba site by K. Ueno
Ueno reported that the formatting error of 2007-2008 data was corrected, but other inconsistenterrors were pointed out by S. Williams. Accordingly, individual site managers have been asked to checkthose matters and answers are anticipated soon. In addition, Ueno is writing a proposal to Japan Scienceand Technology Agency (JST) to secure the next year's budget. The team will make effort to complete atleast the four-year mission and generation of the data set.
(4.2c) Central Vietnam and Western Indonesia sites by H. Kamimera
Central Vietnam
Kamimera reported that at Da Nang station of the Central Vietnam site the AWS measurementand data logging has been in operation since October 2008 and automated data transfer to remote
servers both at Ha Noi and Japan was installed in March 2009. However, the data transfer stopped in
April 2009 and therefore the team visited the site in September to download the data and repair the
automated data transfer. The team in Japan now can monitor the condition of the AWS and collect thedata in near-real-time. A 1-year dataset (October 2008 – September 2009) is available and the team will
do check and control of the data quality. At first they will cross-check the data quality with operational
half-daily surface measurement which has been carried out by National Hydro-Meteorological Service ofVietnam. After that they will check and control the data quality by using the QC system of the University ofTokyo (UT) which has been developed and maintained by Dr. Eiji Ikoma of the UT.
Western Indonesia
Kamimera further reported that their team is now doing the quality check of AWS data in 2007 of
Kototabang and MIA by using the QC system of the UT. Before uploading the data onto the QC system,
they aggregated 1-minute raw data into a 30-minute dataset. In this process, they have alreadyconducted preliminary QC of data. Therefore they can check the data quality more carefully by using the
QC system. The team would like to acknowledge Dr. Ikoma for his work.
(4.2d) Western Pacific Ocean site by H. Kubota
Kubota reported that continuous observation is performed at Palau of "Western Pacific Ocean"site. Their team has visited Palau and collected the latest observation data until end of September 2009.
Palau AWS data for the year 2007 is converted into University of Tokyo QC system format. The quality
check of the data is now being performed and will be completed in the near future.
(4.2e) Lower Yellow River site by H. Lei
Lei reported that all the instruments were going well at the Lower Yellow River site except some
non-critical ones, such as instruments on soil moisture, soil temperature, and air temperature and relative
humidity at certain levels (some of them were damaged by a plough). Their team is considering replacingthese damaged instruments in early 2010. They have carried out the Quality Control/Quality Assurance ofthe data before 2008. The data is being prepared for upload and this work will be completed soon.
(4.2f) Mongolia site by I. Kaihotsu
Kaihotsu reported that the three AWS at the Mongolia site, which have been monitoring water
cycle elements since 2001, were well working as of September 2009. In addition, turbulencemeasurement was successfully tested in 2008 and the monitoring of turbulence elements started in 2009.
4.3 Site Reports Obtained From The Oral Discussion
The Following reports were provided by persons who were able to participate directly in the call.
The accounts for each site listed in this section are based on notes taken by Koudelova during the oral
discussions. They must, therefore, be considered a very rough draft of the exact information provided byeach site representative during the call. The information presented by the participants is greatly
appreciated and everyone feels they benefit from the oral discussion but as noted in item 4.1 above brief
written summaries provided in advance of the call will always be a very good way to assist with andstimulate the oral discussion and will also be an excellent way of ensuring accuracy of the call report andthe actions noted in that report. In the future, therefore, brief written summaries will be asked for inadvance of the call from ALL participants as well as from those who are unable to participate.
As noted above Benedict has accepted action A5 to communicate with the site representatives
at the time of the planning for the next call to ask all participants to submit brief written status reports
prior to the conference call itself. This will allow for a more efficient organization and implementation of
the call. All members of this Group who are responsible for site management/operations should be
prepared near the time of the next call to undertake action A5a to submit brief WRITTEN status
reports.
(4.3a) Tibet site by H. Ishikawa
Ishikawa reported that due to certain power system issues, some data are missing in the first halfof 2009. The issues were resolved and equipment checked in July and the data continue to be collected.
It is expected that the site will continue for next 3-4 years. In addition, Ishikawa advised the group that
the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute had installed a wellequipped observatory near the Tibet tower site.
(4.3b) Lanzhou site by Z. Wu
Wu reported that the Lanzhou site data were prepared for submission but the team was waitingfor permission by China Meteorological Administration (CMA) to release them. In this context, Koike
voiced that he was anticipating response from CMA regarding the data policy and would undertake
necessary steps to reach the agreement in the near future.
(4.3c) Heihe river basin site by X. Li
Li reported that the data from 5 stations had been uploaded and the quality check was being
performed. Another station data will be uploaded in the near future. Nevertheless, also these data cannot
be released before the agreement on the data policy between CMA and CEOP.
(4.3d) Lower Yellow River site by H. Lei
Lei introduced the update as provided in the written input (see 4.2e above).
(4.3e) Eastern Siberian Tundra, Eastern Siberian Taiga, Mongol Arvayheer, Mongol Nalaikh sites by H.
Yabuki
Yabuki reported that the Mongol Arvayheer site was closed and the Nalaikh site was underreconstruction that would be completed by the end of October. Then the measurement at this site willcontinue.
Yabuki further voiced that the quality check of the Siberian Tundra and Taiga site data had been
completed and work on the site documentation was now underway.

(4.3f) Central Vietnam and Western Indonesia sites by H. Kamimera
Kamimera introduced the update as provided in the written input (see 4.2c above).
(4.3g) Western, Central, Eastern, Northern, and Southern Indonesia by M. Yamanaka
Yamanaka reported that Dr. Hamada was in Indonesia checking the observation sites equipment
and collecting data. He will proceed with the data quality check in the near future. He further mentionedthat the recent earthquake that affected the Eastern Indonesia site did not cause any damages to themeasuring instruments and the site continued in observation and data collection.
(4.3h) Himalayas site by E. Vuillermoz
Vuillermoz reported that they had sent the updated metadata to S. Williams, who confirmed
receiving of it and acknowledged its completeness. Vuillermoz further voiced that next part of observed
data would be quality-checked and submitted to the CEOP Database in the near future.
4.4 CEOP 10-year dataset
In the context of the action item accepted at the time of the Melbourne meeting to define andorganize a CEOP 10 year dataset (see item 3.1b above), the representatives of the sites that had been in
operation since CEOP Phase 1 were asked for kind cooperation on this task (action A6). From those,
who attended the call, this action was accepted by Ishikawa (Tibet), Vuillermoz (Himalayas), Yabuki(Siberian Tundra and Taiga), and Yamanaka (West Indonesia).

5.

CLOSING
Koike and Benedict acknowledged the participants for attending the call and providing theirvaluable contributions, comments and suggestions. The call was adjourned at 6:30 UTC.