# Satellite Climate Data Records: Development, Applications, and Societal Benefits
## 5 Conclusion  
To sustain CDR production and service, the transition of algorithms, software, and products from research environment to operational environment, using well-developed standards, processes, and maturity requirements, is necessary. A two-phased research to operation transition is a feasible scheme. The first phase should focus on capturing the data set and the software that generated it along with other relevant information (documentation, metadata, read me files, _etc._). The second phase involves \"operationalizing\" the software that generates the data set with a focus on software rejuvenation for portability and long-term maintenance. All the CDR products (source codes, documents, and datasets) should be freely accessible and with a production process that is publicly transparent. Transparency of CDR development and production processes and free open access of data products are essential to maintaining credibility of the CDR products themselves. In addition, further improvement of the operational CDRs through research is also necessary, especially when new observations and technology become available. The improved products can be treated as a new version of the CDRs and used to replace the old version though another round of R2O transition. The application and societal benefit of satellite CDR are more in science in current stage and are going to grow into more societal sectors due to the legacy benefits from the space RS. In the application of societal sectors, though space RS and satellite CDR are similar, space RS is more practical and in a timely manner, while satellite CDR is more strategic and far reaching. For example, from the RS, one may determine in real-time, what is the good place for fish aggregation, while from CDR, one may gain the knowledge of the long-term spatial-temporal distribution of fish schools. Combined with the knowledge of the fish's life cycle, it is more convenient to estimate yearly fishing yield, manage fishing moratorium, design ship routes to avoid destroying the fish habitat, and design tourist routes to visit fish schools underwater. The production of ICDR in addition to FCDR and TCDR can also expand CDR user community from delayed-time users to near-real time users in various commercial sectors. The derivation of CIR can enhance satellite CDR application in decision making and public service. Leveraging the broader applications of environment data records (EDRs) from satellite remote sensing is also an effective way of enhancing CDR application. For examples, extending climate data records to broader long-term reference environment data records (REDRs) will benefit more user sectors. Climate reanalysis data is another type of long-term climate record widely used in climate applications. Reanalyses are produced by a data assimilation system, which is a climate forecasting model adjusted to the observational data (such as satellite and _in-situ_ measurements) using some numerical bias correction techniques [143; 144; 145]. The diagnostic meteorological fields output from the data assimilation system are climate reanalysis variables, which are widely used for climate studies. The assimilation in the system is normally performed on limited observational variables, such as radiance, temperature, _etc._ but many diagnostic meteorological fields are output on a regular grid as reanalysis variables for broader climate applications. However, any errors contained in the observational variables used for the assimilation will propagate into the output diagnostic variables even though the numerical bias correction techniques have been used to minimize the error propagation. Improving the quality of the input observational data (such as using CDRs as inputs instead of EDRs) for the assimilation system will reduce the error propagated from the input observational variables into the reanalysis variables. Currently, satellite EDRs are widely used as the observational input for the data assimilation systems to produce climate reanalysis products.