All climate services, from data provision through seasonal climate forecasting, to the monitoring of, and adaptation to, climate variability and change, as well as disaster risk reduction, depend on high quality and well-managed climate data. Consistently assessing how well the data are managed is one way to establish or demonstrate the trustworthiness of the data. Dataset self-assessments can be performed with the WMO Stewardship Maturity Matrix for Climate Data (SMM-CD) and the subsidiary SMM-CD for National and Regional Purposes (SMM-CD_NRP) and allow managers to discover WMO recommended data stewardship practices, determine a roadmap for future development and improvement, as well as compare their process against other data providers. Datasets which have been maturity assessed are included in the WMO Climate Data Catalogue where users can include the results of these maturity assessments into their decision-making process.
The rationale behind the construction of these stewardship maturity matrices is described in the following peer-reviewed paper: ‘Stewardship Maturity Assessment Tools for Modernization of Climate Data Management’, published in the Data Science Journal published February 9, 2021. (https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-007)