Managing Surface Station Metadata for Real-Time and Climate Applications

The NOAA Cooperative Institute for Regional Prediction (CIRP) supports the collection, archival, integration, and dissemination of surface environmental observations from several thousand stations deployed by hundreds of agencies, commercial firms, and private citizens. This effort is referred to as MesoWest (see http://www.met.utah.edu). Managing metadata is a critical component of MesoWest, especially metadata from the Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS). The successes and limitations of the MesoWest approach to managing metadata will be discussed as well as the growing need to define the nation's surface observing capabilities.