The UK’s National Physical Laboratory is leading a project to develop a quality assurance assessment framework for C3S data products.
Dr Joanne Nightingale
NPL
Joanne’s research interests include: assessing the quality of information about forests derived from in situ measurement devices and Earth Observation Satellites; improving global satellite-derived biophysical product validation strategies; and contributing to good practice guidance for the evaluation of ECV data records.
The European Climate initiative, C3S, provides unprecedented access to a wealth of Earth observation data that will be turned into products and services to help mitigate the effects of climate change.
The UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is leading the key contract to develop a quality assurance assessment framework that will ensure the data products C3S provides are adequately documented and accompanied by Quality Information sufficient for data users to make informed decisions on product fitness for purpose.
Copernicus Climate Change Service
The Copernicus Climate Change Service aims to provide reliable information about the current, past and future state of the climate through a Climate Data Store. The data will be provided with a quality assessment which will help to inform data users (including scientists, public authorities and policy-makers) on the suitability of environmental information to support adaptation and mitigation of climate change. Prior to being vetted for entry into the Climate Data Store, data products derived from satellite and in situ observations, will first undergo a scientific quality assessment.
C3S Quality Assurance Framework
The Evaluation and Quality Control for Observations project (EQCO), led by NPL, will deliver a quality assurance framework aimed at informing users of the methods used in the product retrieval algorithm, the completeness of the quality indicators provided and how suitable it is for particular applications.
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the UK’s National Measurement Institute, and is a world-leading centre of excellence in developing and applying the most accurate measurement standards, science and technology available.
To facilitate the production of these assessments for a large number of datasets, EQCO, under the leadership of NPL, will construct an evaluation framework implementable through a web portal with embedded content management system and provide completed scientific assessments and gap analyses on multiple datasets (satellite and in situ) to ensure practicability of the framework. The work being undertaken in this contract is building upon tools and methods developed within the EU Framework 7 programme QA4ECV project and the H2020 project Fiduceo led by the University of Reading.
Funding acknowledgements
This project is EU-funded through the Copernicus Climate Change Programme, implemented by European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
