ACRE WG 1 held a meeting at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC) of the National Research Council (NRC) in Bologna, Italy from the 27th-29th of May 2009. This meeting was linked to the COST HOME Action Management Committee meeting on data homogenisation (http://www.homogenisation.org/) on the 25th and 26th of May 2009.
The original idea for this ACRE WG1 meeting was to bring together climate scientists with geographers, historians, archivists and the like, to focus on consolidating our knowledge about, and promoting the recovery imaging, digitisation and archiving of, historical instrumental weather observations for Europe and the colonies of the old European powers over the globe. It would be the first meeting under ACRE WG1.
The objective of the meeting expanded to include discussions on plans to develop an electronic 'interface' that can access all the main sources/repositories of international historical surface terrestrial and marine weather observations on daily to sub-daily time scales (ICOADS, ISPD, ECA&D etc etc) plus all of the meta data and electronic images of the original material, and be able to produce an interactive electronic archive with visualisations on Google Earth (or similar) that could be interactively accessed and interrogated to the extent of being able to extract any data, meta data, images and the like. This is already expanding to potentially take in historical sub-surface oceanic and early upper-air observations, plus perhaps historical river/water data, and of course even the gridded historical reanalyses fields and such that ACRE is helping to support.
However, Google funds to finance such a large workshop were not available, so a much smaller and focused meeting to plan for a larger meeting on Data and Data Visualisation was convened. The presentations from this meeting are available to download below, and the following link is to the notes on the major discussion sessions during the last two days of the workshop.