Introduction

SBSTA/COP for its 23rd Session in Montreal, November 2005 made the following request to the GTOS Secretariat:
“The SBSTA welcomed the efforts by the GTOS secretariat to develop a framework for the preparation of guidance materials, standards and reporting guidelines for terrestrial observing systems for climate and encouraged the GTOS to continue its work. It also called on the GTOS secretariat to assess the status of the development of standards for each of the essential climate variables in the terrestrial domain. The SBSTA invited the GTOS secretariat to report on its progress by SBSTA 26 (May 2007).”

Current status report

A status report has been developed for SBSTA 26, the full analysis for each terrestrial ECV will be completed for SBSTA 27, December 2007, in which issues regarding systematic observations will be discussed.

ECV status report 111kb, v05, March 2007

The approach employed and progress made are described in section 2., findings to date are summarized in section 3., plans for the next steps in section 4., and conclusions based on the work to date in section 5. Examples of documentation completed for individual essential climatic variables (ECV) are provided in the Annex.

Individual ECV reports on standards

T1 River Discharge

T2 Water Use

T3 Ground Water

T4 Lake level

T5 Snow Cover

T6 Glaciers and Ice Caps

T7 Permafrost and Seasonally-Frozen Ground

T8 Albedo

T9 Land Cover

T10 Fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation - fAPAR

T11 Leaf Area Index - LAI

T12 Biomass

T13 Fire disturbance

The above activities are part of Task Number CL-06-03 of the GEOSS implementation plan of GEO.