Recommendations for filling identified gaps: weather data

GODAN Action supports data users, producers and intermediaries to effectively engage with open data and maximise its potential for impact in the agriculture and nutrition sectors. In particular, we work to strengthen capacity, to promote common standards and best practice, and to improve how we measure impact. This report presents a number of recommendations aimed at improving current practices around the creation and use of standards that support the collection and use of weather data. We draw on both the assessments of existing gaps between current and best practice reported in our ‘Gap analysis on weather data standards’ (Pesce, Dodds, Tennison & Zervas 2017) and the general recommendations from ‘Recommendations for filling identified gaps in data standards for food and agriculture’ (Tennison, Dodds, Pesce & Zervas 2017). To better understand the needs of data users we also conducted a brief “developer experience” review based on the farm management use case described in ‘Agrifood data standards: a gap exploration report’ (Pesce, Kayumbi,Tennison, Mey & Zervas 2016) . Weather data infrastructure has developed over many years, through a number of international efforts to support the work of meteorological services around the world. In some cases the formats and data structures used to report and share data either pre-date the internet or are used in other media, for example in radio and satellite broadcasts. This has left its mark on the current state of the data and standards landscape. Many of the existing formats, while widely used by some organisations, are not accessible or well-documented for use by non-specialists. But the increasing use of weather data, as an important component in new products and services means that it must be more accessible to a wider audience.  We think that the key opportunities around improving use of standards around weather data should focus on: attempting to address discovery issues relating to weather data, by improving use of metadata standards to help catalogue and describe data published by existing organisation, in existing formats improving the documentation and description of existing data sources, in particular through the creation of developer documentation and by investing in publishing existing vocabularies in new ways exploring options to build a community of practice around weather and agricultural data, for example through a community-lead Q&A “help desk”.