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  European Climate Assessment & Dataset (KNMI) The main objective of this project is to realize a sustainable operational system for data gathering, archiving, quality control, analysis and dissemination, in order to have a platform and a basis to prepare the next European Climate Assessment Report in 2006. Following the document that describes the technical work of the ECA&D project and its infrastructure, prototypes were developed for the operational database and for the new web-interface. KNMI has tested all these prototypes. The results of these tests were promising and clearly illustrate the advantage of the new website. The automated updating procedure of daily ECA series with GTS synoptical data turned out to work well. Furthermore, automated procedures for placing quality control flags to the daily data were developed, tested and implemented. The new website http://www.eca.knmi.nl was formally launched and presented at the European Conference on Applied Climatology in Nice, September 2004. The new website features improved access to the daily station series and provides a much more complete overview of the results of the trend analyses that have been performed with the aid of indices of extremes. In addition, the results of the quality control procedures and homogeneity tests that have been applied to all series are better presented. To minimize time gaps in data series and to extend the data series until present, synoptical messages are used as exchanged over the Global Telecommunication System. This daily extension of the series, in combination with full automation of statistical procedures, gives the visitor of the website the functionality to download data series and to create time series plots and trend maps for indices of extremes that are very up-to-date. ECA&D is involved in a related activity called ENSEMBLES. This FP6 project of EU held its kick-off with a meeting in Hamburg on 15 and 16 September 2004. ENSEMBLES is a major research project with a total of 72 partners, including most meteorological services in Western Europe (the UK Met Office is the overall co-ordinator of ENSEMBLES). The project covers climate change modelling and prediction on time scales from seasons to decades, as well as model validation using observational datasets. KNMI and MeteoSwiss participate in the workpackage WP5.1, which aims at developing a daily resolution gridded dataset for Europe on the basis of a network of daily station data. This activity can only be successful if it builds upon the dataset developed in ECA&D. In that respect we do see ENSEMBLES as a good starting point for a new EUROGRID initiative of ECSN. To be successful we need the support of all ECSN members to contribute additional station series in order to obtain a denser network. Note, that these additional station series are only used for gridding purposes and they will not be released or made public like the other ECA&D data.

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