Establishing and Operating Regional WIGOS Centers in the WMO Regional Association VI
The RA VI Regional WIGOS Centre Workshop, held from 14 to 15 March 2023, brought together representatives from candidate Members for hosting RWCs, the EUMETNET Observations Capability Area Management Programme manager, the Chair of the Vice-Chair of RA VI Working Group for Observation, Infrastructure and Information Systems, the Chair of Expert Team on WIGOS Tools, the leader and vice-leader of the RA VI Task Team on WIGOS, representatives from RWC Beijing and RWC Tokyo, and staff from the WIGOS branch and the Regional Office for Europe of the WMO Secretariat.
The purpose of the workshop was to discuss the establishment and operation of RWCs in RA VI, and to review and develop the RWC concept for the Regional Association VI (Europe) and implementation plan.
Discussions centred around the roles of hosts, the required resources and the readiness of the host to perform the mandatory functions of metadata management in OSCAR/Surface and WDQMS (evaluation and incident management).
Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, Romania and Türkiye, as well as EUMETNET, expressed interest in hosting the Centres. Furthermore, EUMETNET indicated their intent to only perform the quality monitoring function for EUMETNET members without metadata management, while candidate Members showed their willingness to host the RWCs by allocating the necessary resources to operate them and perform both mandatory functions.
The affiliated members for each RWC will be determined by taking into account factors such as the balanced distribution among RWCs, the geographic proximity of Members to RWCs, existing cooperation agreements between RWCs and Members, language and cultural familiarity between RWCs and Members.
The next steps of the process will be guided by an implementation plan, which was developed at the workshop.