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Quantitative approaches to climate risk management such as mapping or impact modelling rely on past meteorological data with daily or sub‐daily resolution, a large fraction of which have not yet been digitized. Over the last decade or so, a number of projects have contributed to the rescue of some of these data. Here we provide a summary of a survey we have undertaken of several meteorological and climate data rescue projects, in order to identify the needs of climate data rescue services. To make these efforts more sustainable, additional integrated activities are needed. We argue that meteorological and climate data rescue must be seen as a continuous, coordinated long‐term effort. Technical developments (e.g. data assimilation), new scientific questions (e.g. process understanding of extreme events) and new social (e.g. risk assessment, health) or economic (e.g. new renewable energy sources, agriculture and forestry, tourism, infrastructure, etc.) services are highlighting the immense value of data previously neglected or never considered. This continuous effort is currently undertaken by projects of various sizes, structure, funding and staffing, as well as by dedicated programmes, ranging from those within many national weather services down to 'grassroots' initiatives. These activities are often not sufficiently coordinated, staffed, or funded at an international level and will benefit considerably from climate data rescue services being established within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) (https://climate.copernicus.eu/).

Surface temperature data – observed primarily for weather-related purposes – are disparate, originating from ever evolving instrument types and observational practices. Although several global databases are in use internationally, no comprehensive global repository exists and many data are undigitized or restricted. Scientists have painstakingly obtained vast quantities of data, carefully removed random errors and accounted for systematic biases. The 21st Century demands go further - requiring highly detailed (spatially and temporally), globally complete, long-term products, with quantified uncertainties, and created from freely available, fully traceable data. Many decisions of substantial socio-economic importance rely on the accuracy of such products. An international meeting was held to plan how best to facilitate such efforts. A central repository is to be created, where data are traceable from their origins to final product. Strategies are outlined to rescue non-digitized data and move towards entirely freely available data. Creation of multiple methodologically independent products is recommended for quantifying uncertainty. Methods of benchmarking and assessing multiple products to aid inter-comparison and end-user product selection are described. Data-products would be obtained and visualized using in-house tools from the planned data-portal. Structure and governance include engagement with bodies such as WMO and, importantly, with experts other than climatologists.

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Atmospheric and oceanic teleconnections link the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave (ACW) in the Southern Ocean [White and Peterson, 1996] and the global El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) wave (GEW) in the tropical Indo-Pacific Ocean [White and Cayan, 2000], both signals characterized by eastward phase propagation and 3- to 5-year- period variability. We extend the tropical standing mode of ENSO into the extratropics by regressing the Niño-3 sea surface temperature (SST) index against sea level pressure (SLP) anomalies over the globe, finding the Pacific-South America (PSA) pattern in SLP anomaly [Cai and Baines, 2001] straddling Drake Passage in the Southern Ocean. The amplitude of this PSA pattern is ∼1/3 that of the ACW in this domain and thus cannot be considered its principal driver. On the other hand, suppressing the tropical standing mode of ENSO in interannual ST (surface temperature) and SLP anomalies over the globe allows the GEW to be observed much more readily, whereupon its eastward phase propagation across the Warm Pool is found to remotely force the ACW in the eastern Pacific and western Atlantic sectors of the Southern Ocean through atmospheric teleconnections [Sardeshmukh and Hoskins, 1988] which propagate along with it. Subsequently, the ACW propagates this imposed GEW signal throughout the remainder of the Southern Ocean as a coupled wave in covarying ST and SLP anomalies, whereupon entering the Indian sector 1.5 to 2.5 years later it spawns a northern branch which takes another 1.5 to 2.5 years to propagate the ACW signal equatorward into the Warm Pool south of Indonesia. There it interferes constructively with the GEW. Thus the two forms of teleconnection, one fast and directed from the tropics to the high southern latitudes via the atmosphere and the other slow and directed from the high southern latitudes to the tropics via the ocean, complete a global circuit of 3- to 5-year duration that reinforces both the ACW and GEW and influences the tropical