Call/response on climate monitoring station records an opportunity for open data?

Nature’s editorial of 2 December called for various measures to make it easier for climate scientists to produce the analyses that are used to model the world’s climate. These underpin the current thinking on the probability and effects of a warmer climate in the near future, and the essential ingredient is data. According to the editorial the data is subject to international agreements on its publication. So it is good to see an announcement from the Met Office on 5 December to the effect that data from 5000 temperature monitor stations should be available from ‘early next week’. The agreement has been influenced by the World Meteorological Organisation, the UN’s weather body.

To a layman, the two obvious questions are how accessible, and how useful, this ‘subset of the full HadCRUT record of global temperatures’ will be.