Results

The main results of the GAIA-CLIM project were:

• The Maturity Matrix Assessment (MMA) developed within GAIA-CLIM to assess various quantifiable aspects of the maturity of a measurement system or network of measurement systems.
• Product Traceability and Uncertainty (PTU) documents that represent a consistent metrological (measurement science) based approach to understanding measurement systems and their processing. Their key foundation is a traceability diagram that fully outlines the processing steps from SI units or internationally agreed standards to the final reported measurement.
• Methods developed for - and applied to - the quantification of smoothing and sampling issues in a range of atmospheric ground-based measurement techniques, and to estimate the uncertainties that need to be taken into account when comparing non-perfectly co-located ground-based and satellite measurements with different spatio-temporal smoothing and sampling properties. Libraries (i.e. guiding material and data files) of such uncertainties for key ground-based measurement systems and for key comparisons have been made available.
  
• The 'the ‘GRUAN Processor’ tool, which enables the comparison of co-located geophysical fields and simulated brightness temperatures between radiosondes and model fields.
• The GAIA-CLIM Virtual Observatory, providing a unified platform for co-located observations, with statistics and uncertainty propagation information for both level-1 and level-2 products.
• The gap assessment of unfulfilled user needs in observation capability of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) within the sphere of the GAIA-CLIM project, which is sumarised in the Gaps Assessment and Impacts Document (GAID). The full details on all identified gaps are available in an online Catalogue of Gaps.
• The Recommendations document that is a high-level accessible document, destilling the findings from the gap analysis performed within GAIA-CLIM into a set of 11 actionable priority recommended activities.