Advancing global hydro-climatological data archives to support climate change impact assessments on water resources

Climate variations and changing climate will very likely alter the rate and nature of hydrological processes and consequently affect water resources in many regions. Current General Circulation Models and downscaling methods that are increasingly used to assess changes in the water cycle and water resource vulnerabilities introduce a cascade of uncertainties that cannot realistically be dealt with at the moment and are too inaccurate to support improved decision-making for water management and for future water systems design. Therefore, water managers need not only improved hydrological and climate modelling and downscaling methods but also access to adequate hydro-meteorological monitoring networks. The Global Terrestrial Network for Hydrology (GTN-H), a joint effort by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and several global observing systems, aims at integrating in-situ and remote sensing hydrological observations with hydrological model results held by its partner institutions to support a wide range of hydrological applications including research of global and regional climate change. Adhering to the different needs of all data users (scientists, policy makes and other stakeholders) and bridging the gap between the distributed datasets, currently a new information system is being developed to enable web-based discovery, access and analysis of observation data and derived products served through GTN-H. This system is built on international standards published by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) using open standardized web services, namely (1) Catalogue Services for data discovery, (2) Web Map Services for data visualization and (3) Web Feature Services, Web Coverage Services and Sensor Observation Services for data access. This presentation will give an overview about the GTN-H data archive and the design of the new information system including an outlook of its potential use for water related climate change impact assessments.