Overview
It is widely recognized that global climate change poses a major threat to sustainable development objectives. In order to build up climate resilience, decisions concerning mitigation and adaptation strategies on climate change must be based on high-quality data, collected in a sustainable manner. CATCOS contributed to filling data gaps in regions where climate-relevant information has been missing or measurements have been ceased. In doing so, the project provided a significant contribution to the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS).
CATCOS supported the monitoring of the essential climate variables aerosols, greenhouse gases and glaciers in ten developing and emerging countries. To ensure the sustainable continuation of the observations, the implementation of the new measuring instruments was accompanied by a set of training activities. These enhanced the skills of local station operators and scientists in standard data processing methods, quality control, data analysis and scientific publication. The resulting high-quality data were submitted to the respective international data centers where they were made available freely. In addition, CATCOS enhanced regional cooperation to optimize the use and benefit of climate observations and services. Well-targeted communication on local, regional and global scales highlighted the benefit of the available data for science-based decision-making.
Phase 1 of the project ran from September 2011 to March 2014 (for more informations see CATCOS Phase 1). The second phase started in April 2014 and the activities ran through December 2016 (for more information see CATCOS Phase 2).