CBS-MG-XII/Doc. 7.1
WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANIZATION
______________
COMMISSION FOR BASIC SYSTEMS
CBS-MG-XII/Doc. 7.1
(06.VII.2011)
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MANAGEMENT GROUP, TWELFTH SESSION
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, 13-16 JULY 2011
ITEM: 7.1
Original: ENGLISH
COSTS OF THE GLOBAL OBSERVING SYSTEM
(Submitted by Chair, OPAG-IOS)
ISSUES TO BE DISCUSSED:
Approach for undertaking an analysis for determining the costs of the Global Observing System (GOS).
ADDITIONAL FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS:
Additional resources financial (for a consultant) and/or in-kind (if personnel from NMHSs) are used.
DECISIONS/ACTIONS REQUIRED:
Agreement to pursue approach outlined in document.
REFERENCE(S):
CONTENT OF DOCUMENT:
Appendix for inclusion in the final report:
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CBS-MG-XII/Doc. 7.1
Draft, prepared for the CBS Management Group Meeting, July 13-16 2011
By
Lars Peter Riishojgaard
Chair, Open Program Area Group for Integrated Observing Systems
Accurate weather forecasting requires continuous access to observational data from the entire globe. The necessary observations are made by a large number of NMHSs and other national and international organizations around the world under the auspices of the WMO Global Observing
System. Operating the observation networks and sensor systems – many of them in remote locations and/or in harsh environments - around the clock, 365 days per year is costly, but due to the immense economic and other societal benefits from the weather forecast activities made possible by these observations, the expense of obtaining them is generally considered to be well justified. This note provides some thoughts on the merit of providing an estimate of the total cost of operating the GOS. It should be pointed out that the closely related and equally important issue of estimating the economic value of the resulting observations falls outside the scope of this document.
The few estimates of the total cost of operating the GOS that are available vary widely, but they generally lie in the range of several $B per year. Bearing such a cost alone would be all but impossible for any one country or organization, and in fact the burden is shared among all WMO members and a number of other contributors (e.g. airlines, space agencies). The primary role of
WMO is the coordination of (i) making at least a minimum number of relevant observations on a routine basis, and (ii) ensuring the free and open exchange of them among its ~190 member states.
Because of the high costs of meteorological observations on one hand and their high value on the other, this coordination of free and open data exchange is arguably the single most important service provided by WMO to its members. In return for a relatively small contribution to the WMO budget, its member states gain access to observations from other members and organizations without which accurate weather forecasting would be impossible. It would be both politically and economically impractical even for the largest and wealthiest countries to gain access to this volume of observational information by any other means.
This unique leveraging opportunity offered by WMO membership tends to be poorly understood, not only by the general public but also by key government officials in many countries. Not even all individuals working for the NMHSs of the member states are fully aware of this. There may be two main reasons for lack of awareness. One is ignorance about the following fundamental fact of numerical weather prediction: Extending the forecast range in time inevitably extends the necessary model domain in space, which then in turn extends the domain over which observations are needed. All organizations running numerical model predictions beyond the 2-3 day range therefore have essentially identical requirements: Global data coverage. The other reason is while most member states and other agencies probably have good internal estimates of the cost of making their own observations, reliable numbers for the sum of theses costs on a global scale are difficult to come by and therefore not widely known.

CBS-MG-XI/Doc. 7.1
The main point of this note is to argue that WMO and its members would benefit from developing and documenting a reasonably accurate estimate of the total annual cost of running the Global
Observing System. This would help make the leveraging opportunity described in the previous section clearly visible, and it could become a key element underpinning the mandate for WIGOS.
Such a document could also be referred to in discussions about data policies and data sharing, an issue that surfaces in many different WMO contexts on a regular basis. For instance there are still open issues with data from ground-based radars, and the emerging commercial involvement in running both conventional and space-based observing systems potentially poses a significant challenge to WMO data sharing principles.
It is important to point out that this should not be perceived as an exercise undertaken with a primary purpose of arguing for an increase in the funding of WMO activities. The overarching purpose is to clearly state WMO’s contribution in this area and to defend the GOS from potential erosion of its basic principles of data sharing by providing a reference that clearly demonstrates, to members and other stakeholders, the tremendous value that the GOS provides to them when observational data are shared freely.
In order to maintain credibility, the estimate should be well documented and be based on a reasonably rigorous and objective methodology. Some thoughts on the methodology and the resource requirements are provided in the next section. Also, in order to maintain credibility and to make the cost estimate as useful as possible, it would be desirable for it to attain the status of an official WMO document and it should therefore be approved at the appropriate levels within the working structure of the organization. One possibility would be to include it in the preamble of a high-level WIGOS document such as the (yet to be developed) WIGOS-IP.
One possible path toward estimating the total operating costs for the GOS begins with breaking down the overall system into its components in order to estimate the running costs of these components separately. For the purposes of this document, we now define the main components to be:
1. Surface-based in-situ measurements (land-based)
2. Surface-based in situ measurements (buoys)
3. Radiosonde observations
4. Voluntary ship observations
5. Aircraft measurements
6. Operational satellite data
7. Research satellite data
Components 1) and 3) are predominantly operated by the NMHSs and information about the costs could in many cases in principle be available to WMO by its members. However, the practical task of collecting and reviewing this information from all the member states is of considerable magnitude, and there are no guarantees that the response rate would be high enough to justify this.
It is proposed here to instead follow an approach in which a small group (on the order of 10 to 20) of representative countries are identified for which information about the cost of running their observational networks is relatively easily available. The countries should be selected so as to be representative for a specific group of countries (e.g. large developed country, small developed country, developing country, LDC, island states). For each representative country, the amount spent on running the national components of the GOS is then expressed as a fraction of the national GDP. If the spread of these fractions across the individual groups is small or moderate,

CBS-MG-XI/Doc. 7.1 the cost of running the GOS in all the remaining countries can then be extrapolated to all the countries belonging to that same group simply by multiplying their individual GDP by the scaling factor applicable to the group in which they belong.
Components 6) and 7) are operated by a relatively small group of national and international space agencies, and publicly available budget figures are available for several of them. The costs for those agencies for which information is not available can be extrapolated, for instance based on an average cost per satellite operated by each agency.
Components 2) and 4) are ocean surface observations for which cost estimates may already be available.
The costs of 5) is primarily borne by the participating airlines which may have estimates available.
In any case, the total costs of 2), 4) and 5) are expected to amount to less than 10% of the overall expenditure, and even relatively large uncertainties here are not expected to significantly impact the uncertainty of the total figure.
The overall amount of work is not large – estimated to one month or less in total
The overall amount of work involved in building and documenting such an estimate is not very large, but it probably exceeds what one can reasonably expect one of the existing Expert Teams or Working Groups in the WMO structure to undertake on its own. Secretariat support will therefore be required, either in the form of staff or a dedicated consultant. The total workload should be on the order of one month or less, full-time equivalent. The task of reviewing the document should fall under the responsibility of the CBS management group and could be delegated e.g. to OPAG-IOS or to the appropriate WIGOS-related structure to be defined following the CBS Session in 2012.