Stewardship maturity assessment tools for modernization of climate data management

High quality and well-managed climate data are the cornerstone of all climate services. Consistently assessing how well the data are managed is one way to establish or demonstrate the trustworthiness of the data. This paper presents the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Stewardship Maturity Matrix for Climate Data (SMM-CD) and the subsidiary SMM-CD for National and Regional Purposes (SMM-CD_NRP). Both these matrices have been developed with the support of the WMO and its High-Quality Global Data Management Framework for Climate (HQ-GDMFC). These self-assessment tools enable data 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 SMM-CD contains four categories (data access, usability and usage, quality management, and data management) each of which has a number of aspects, with scores assigned to one of five levels. A smaller number of categories in the SMM-CD_NRP are assigned to four levels appropriate for operationally produced datasets which are national or regional in scope. We explore a number of case studies where these matrices have been applied, as well as supply links to where the Guidance Documents and Assessment Templates (which may be updated) can be found. © 2021 The Author(s).