World Meteorological Organization

Under the guidance of the GCW -AG and in coordination with Standing Committee on Information and Data Management (SC-IMT), the Expert Team on Cryosphere and Polar Data Interoperability (ET-CPDI) promotes and facilitates data sharing in support of WMO cryosphere and polar activities, through the application of interoperability standards at data centres, data provider and consumer levels that are compliant with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) guiding principles, namely:
1. Contribute to the development of regulatory and technical aspects for the implementation of the WMO Unified Data Policy, jointly with the GCW Cryosphere Observing Requirements Task Team;
2. GCW Pilot Project for WIS2.0: Develop the components of the GCW Data Management System as implemented by the GCW Data Portal (approved by EC-73);
3. Facilitate the integration of relevant cryospheric and third-party data in the WMO Information System (WIS);
4. Liaise with relevant bodies/communities as identified in the GCW pre-operational plan (2021), in particular the Arctic Data Committee (ADC) of the Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks (SAON) and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC,) the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Data Management (SCADM), the Third Pole Environment(TPE) Data Center, the Data Centre of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P), the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), etc. and establish interoperable interfaces for the access to cryosphere and polar data across systems, as well as on data standardization, terminology, and semantics;
5. Identify the Network Common Data Form, following the Climate and Forecast metadata conventions (NetCDF-CF) and Attribute Convention for Data Discovery (ACDD) approaches for cryosphere and polar datasets in alignment with the approaches recommended by the SC-IMT NetCDF Task Team.
6. Identify gaps in the standardized data types and their documentation according to the FAIR principles and recommend mitigation between approaches between relevant science bodies, for example the International Science Council (ISC) World Data System (WDS), Committee on Data (CODATA), and Research Data Alliance (RDA) and WMO (e.g. WIS and WIGOS metadata) bodies;
7. Develop guidance material (including software overview) for stations/communities/data centres (e.g. independent research), interested to contribute to WMO activities, with cryosphere and polar datasets.
8. Support the exchange of data in real time, e.g. conversion to Binary Universal Form (BUFR) formats, in coordination with relevant substructures of GCW-AG.
9. Develop a proposal for a solution for the archival and hosting of cryospheric data, which to address the access and the long-term availability and traceability of data sets not currently served through a GCW compliant data centre;
10. Publish the assessment of terminology and semantics on the cryosphere conducted in 2018 and engage the scientific community to address discrepancies.
11. Make recommendations to GCW-AG for establishing task teams and ad-hoc teams for delivering time limited tasks under these terms of reference, with appropriate membership;