ICA&D: Climate services across borders

<p>The International Climate Assessment & Dataset (ICA&D) contributes to the provision of climate services in regions across the world. ICA&D contributes both to the provision of climate data and to climate monitoring, thereby supporting the WMO Regional Climate Centres in carrying-out their mandatory functions.</p><p>In WMO Regional Association VI (Europe and the Middle East), the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D) fulfills this role and from this the ICA&D concept is derived. ICA&D has already been implemented in Indonesia as the Southeast Asian Climate Assessment & Dataset (SACA&D).</p><p>ICA&D facilitates the sharing of daily meteorological surface observations from countries in a given region with meteorological services in that region and with scientists worldwide, and deriving climate monitoring products from these observations. Examples are the climate indices of extremes, such as the number of warm or dry days, which can be monitored over time in view of climate change. ICA&D complements national meteorological databases in having only a daily resolution and containing information from multiple countries in the region in the same format.<br> <br>With support from the EU-funded ClimSA project, under which WMO is implementing a EUR 5.5 million grant, ICA&D will be implemented in the Caribbean, the Pacific and 5 sub-regions in Africa. ICA&D will be set-up in selected Regional Climate Centres that form part of the WMO institutional network. Within the ClimSA project, the ICA&D website has seen an upgrade and has been made more user friendly. Furthermore, e-learning modules are being developed to aid the ICA&D maintainers in the region in updating their ICA&D database and website.</p>