In a report by Draper Laboratory, the climate monitoring community would require an operational monitoring system to gather data. This will aid scientists differentiate between forced change and natural climate variability.
The report states that new sensors on land, in space and at sea will be required since existing platforms are being exhausted. It also compiles the recommendations and findings from workshop discussions and presentations at the 2010 Global Climate Monitoring Conference held in October. The conference was attended by personnel from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, the U.S. Navy and academic organizations.
In the report, it is stated that raw sensor data should be made available to scientists and standard metadata formats should be adopted by the climate monitoring community along with the means to translate data into formats required by individual users.
The establishment of an interagency task force that would include physical and social scientists, decision makers and systems engineers to determine the design of an operational climate information system has been deemed essential by the report. Further, it suggests that decision makers lacking a technical background, should be able to interpret the data while designing infrastructure that can reach stakeholders in local, state and federal governments.
Source: http://www.draper.com/