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Homogenization of Belgian climatological time series for uptake in the Data Store of the Copernicus Climate Change Service

Improving the quality and consistency of time series for climate monitoring and analysis

Context

Belgium has a long history of measuring climatological variables through a dense network of weather stations maintained by national authorities such as the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMIB), the air traffic controller Skeyes, and the meteorological division of the Air Component of the Belgian Armed Forces (Meteorological Wing) (see geographical distribution on the figure below). With the temperature and precipitation time series from the Uccle station (1833-today), Belgium has one of the longest continuous time series of climate observations in Europe and worldwide. Thanks to the dense network of measuring stations Belgium has for more than 150 locations monthly time series of temperature and precipitation available with the longest series extending over more than 100 years.​

Map_climatological_time_series_NOISELESS.png

Figure: Left: Location of the historical (red dots) and long (blue dots) temperature series considered for homogenization. Right: Location of the historical (centennial; blue squares) and long (orange dots) precipitation series considered for homogenization.

Such long climatological time series (i.e., more than 30 years of data) are crucial for climate research, better-informed policymaking, and outreach, specifically linked to the analyses of climate change impacts, trends, and extremes.

 

However, except for the Uccle climatological time series, the time series are currently not accessible in a user-friendly way and only available to a very limited extent.

Objectives

To make these climatological data or so-called High-value datasets for Belgium usable and available to (inter)national users from the research community, policy, public and private sector, the data first need to be homogenized and updated.


Therefore, this project aims to homogenize and update all Belgian monthly climate time series to the most recent years and to develop regional series. The updating process will be automated to ensure annual uptakes and direct access of the data to the Climate Data Store of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the Open Data platforms of RMIB and the Belgian Climate Centre. 


The access to these Belgian climatological data products will be of a very high-benefit for the Belgian climate research community, while also strengthening an evidence-based decision-making especially in the fight against climate change and its impacts. 

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Furthermore, making Belgian climate data available will make an essential contribution to broader international user groups linked to the C3S services. For example, the produced climate data products will contribute to the RODEO project, a collaboration between 11 European national weather services, in the framework of the European Directive on Open Data. In addition, a homogenized and spatially dense network of climate time series, such as the one we will produce here, underpins the quality of gridded datasets for global and regional domains, which are available through the C3S Climate Data Store and very widely used.

Facts​

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