Abstract Observations of planet Earth and especially all climate system components and forcings are increasingly needed for planning and informed decision making related to climate services in the broadest sense. Although signifi cant progress has been made, much more remains to be done before a fully functional and dependable climate observing system exists. Observations are needed on spatial scales from local to global, and all time scales, especially to understand and document changes in extreme events. Climate change caused by human activities adds a new dimension and a vital imperative: to acquire climate observations of suffi cient quality and coverage, and analyze them into products for multiple purposes to inform decisions for mitigation, adaptation, assessing vulnerability and impacts, possible geo-engineering, and predicting climate variability and change and their consequences. A major challengeis to adequately deal with the continually changing observing system, especially from satellites and other remote sensing platforms such as in the ocean, in order to provide a continuous climate record. Even with new computational tools, challenges remain to provide adequate analysis, processing, meta-data, archival, access, and management of the resulting data and the data products. As volumes of data continue to grow, so do the challenges of distilling information to allow us to understand what is happening and why, and what the implications are for the future. The case is compelling that prompt coordinated international actions are essential to provide for informationbased actions and decisions related to climate variability and change.

TRENBERTH Kevin;  ANTHES Richard;  BROWN Otis;  HABERMANN Ted;  KARL Thomas;  RUNNING Steve;  RYAN Barbara;  TANNER Michael;  WIELICKI Bruce;  BELWARD Alan; 

2014-01-23

Springer

JRC88411

978-94-007-6691-4,   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC88411,   

10.1007/978-94-007-6692-1,