Welcome to Climsoft

What is Climsoft?

Climsoft is a software suite for storing climatic data in a secure and flexible manner and for extracting useful information from the data. Climsoft is a free open-source project, licensed under GPL3. It is widely used by National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) of developing countries.

What can Climsoft do for me?

Climsoft, Climate Data Management System (CDMS) is designed for organisations who wish to store historical climatic data in computerised form. These data can be used to produce summary reports, maps or diagrams or subsets of the data can be extracted for further processing.

Climate information is essential for many purposes; disaster risk reduction, food security planning, infrastructure and transport management, water supply and sewerage, public health surveillance, sustainable urban development, biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability, etc.

A well-managed climate database is a national "public good" asset, and this is a key responsibility of the National Meteorological and Hydrological Service of every Country.

Capabilities of Climsoft CDMS Version 4, that make it suitable for use in many National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) are:

• Scalability - Climsoft can be implemented in a standalone Windows computer at the observatory as well as in a server at NMHS headquarters. It allows connectivity between the observatories and the remote database server thereby enabling data digitization right from the source. It works very well in a multi-user environment allowing many users to access the centralized climate database concurrently for different operations;
• Ingestion of data from Automatic Weather Station (AWS) - Climsoft automatically ingests data from Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs) on real time basis thereby making those observations available for all purposes from weather forecasting to long-term climate impacts;
• Message encoding and Forwarding to WMO Information System (WIS) - Climsoft encodes observations into weather messages according the WMO standards of Table Driven Code Forms (TDCF). It is capable of forwarding those encoded messages to the WIS global network;
• Management of images of paper records (paper archives) in support of Data Rescue - Images of paper records can be stored and retrieved to facilitate immediate checking of keyed data against the handwritten observation sheets. The I-DARE portal provides advice;
• Climate Products and Services - Climsoft produces standard WMO climate products from the archived and quality controlled data. It also exports data in formats ready for use by statistical packages and many climate applications including RCLIMDEX, CPT, GEOCLIM, R-INSTAT and ENACTS;
• Linkage to R-Instat software - Climsoft interrogate very well with R-Instat general statistical package to produce variety of climate summaries and reports (including wind rose, time series plots, trend analysis graphs, Climate Normals,calculations of the start/ends of rain, length of the season, spell length (dry/wet), Data Inventory graphs, spatial distribution maps, Examine trend and quantify the evidence of climate change (global warming), rainfall variability, etc.)