Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Presidency of Meteorology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has established a climate data rescue program consisting of imaging and keying older data, and the documentation and archival of metadata information and quality control procedures, all crucial for long-term climate analyses. The program began by organizing monthly registers and the creation of an inventory of climate data records still existing in paper format. There are more than 30 cabinets of documents of 30 KSA manual stations. A plan to image paper documents has been established and facilities to undertake this component of climate data rescue has been identified and acquired. Approximating 91 percent of the daily data have been keyed, including all daily data from 1970 to present. Keying of the daily data for 13 stations for the 1950-1969 period is ongoing. Quality control of all data (including sub-daily), that involves examining outliers, computing and comparing daily and monthly values occurs concurrently with keying.