Report - ISO SC5, Meteorology meeting, Helsinki, Finland, 2 September 2010

The ISO SC5 meeting meeting, following the CIMO-TECO in Helsinki, was held in room E122 of the Wanha Satama convention center, starting at 9:00 on Thursday 2 September 2010. At the invitation  of the chairperson of SC5, Rodica Nitu, the HMEI Executive Secretary Bruce Sumner attended the meeting. Mr Sumner made the following report for HMEI members.

Opening of Meeting of ISO SC5
9.00am Thursday 2 September 2010

Participants
There were 23 people in attendance, including Paul Franscioli, SC5 Secretary, Rodica Nitu, SC-5 chairperson, Ben Dieterink, HMEI Chairman, Fred Branski, CBS President, Bill Burnett, Jitze van der Meulen, Michel Leroy, Dr Emanuele Vuerich, and several others.

Items of Interest from the meeting
1. ISO and WMO recently signed an agreement in Los Vegas, that will allow WMO guidelines to be fast-tracked to ISO standards.

2. The status of the current ‘Visual Range Lidar’ standard being worked on by Working Group 6 was reported to the group. The draft standard has been issued for comment directly at the enquiry stage (DIS). This is called a ballot, and it is expected to close on 23 January 2011. About two months after that it will be finalized and will be published as a new standard. The work of three people in particular were mentioned as being instrumental in getting this standard done, Christof Murkel, the chairman from DWD, and Laurent Sauvage from Leosphere and Holger Willie from Jenoptik.

3. The first standard to be jointly developed by ISO and WMO is the siting classification, developed primarily by Michel Leroy as a CIMO project. It was approved by CIMO in at CIMO-XV in September 2010, and now will be promoted to an ISO standard through the normal ISO procedures. But it will be submitted at the DIS level (enquiry stage), the third step in the ISO procedures, and thus jumps several years of preliminary work within the ISO formalities. It will first have 5 months of review at the DIS level, and it can then be promoted to the publication level.

4. To work on the siting classification with ISO it will be necessary to establish a new working group (WG) within SC5. People to sit on this WG were found from the people present at this meeting, and at least six of those attending expressed their wish to be on this WG when it is established.

5. The need to form standardized vocabulary within the meteorology Study Group (SC5) was discussed. This could take the form of a new working group, and would greatly facilitate future work within SC5.

6. To facilitate work on standards it was mentioned that a project can often be broken into smaller components, and each of these developed as an independent standard. This would help some large projects from eventually failing. As people working as a small group on a specific small standard have a greater chance of success that a large group working on a complicated standard.

7. The need to address CIN standards (a European group which also has liaison status with WMO) and for these to be made into ISO standards, was discussed. It was mentioned that only one European standard on a particular issue can exit, either an ISO standard or a CIN standard, but not both. The ISO SC5 secretariat will investigate this issue.

8. As a final note, the participation of industry experts on ISO Working Groups, promoted through HMEI, was noted as being of fundamental importance, and often is essential for a standard to be brought through to publication. In this regard, HMEI’s liaison status with ISO is crucial for the development of future meteorological and hydrological standards.