scope:

This Standard promotes best practices for collecting metadata for hydrometeorological stations and for publishing those metadata publicly at a central repository.

Any operator of a hydrometeorological station located in Canada should follow the WIGOS Metadata. The metadata collected includes information about the observed variable, purpose of the observations, station, monitoring environment, instruments and methods of observation, sampling, data processing and reporting, data quality, ownership and data policy and contacts.

This Standard also provides data users with the metadata taxonomy and the necessary definitions of the metadata elements.

Metadata for any hydrometeorological station located in Canada, and for which the data are available, should be uploaded to the OSCAR/Surface metadata base.

This Standard is an adoption without modification of the WMO WIGOS Metadata Standard (WMO 2019c), a semantic standard that specifies the metadata elements for observations, that can be recorded and exchanged, and the WMO OSCAR/Surface metadatabase (WMO 2020).