The EU Cost Action ClimMani (2014-2018) focussed on building and strengthening the experimental climate-change research community. Key goals of

this Action were to provide guidelines for best experimental practices, and to advance experiment–data–model interactions. ClimMani therefore set out to develop and promote common protocols as a community effort to guide future measurements and experiments, and to improve future inter-site comparisons, meta-analyses, and model–experiment interactions.

In March 2017, 26 ClimMani members met for a workshop and initiated the collection of measurement protocols in climate-change studies. The structure and outline for the project was developed, and leaders for the five chapters appointed. Researchers were identified that could lead protocols based on their scientific expertise. In total, the protocol writing team consisted of 85 authors, who wrote the protocols based on their expert knowledge and existing protocols in the literature.

In a second round, 50 experts reviewed the protocols, after which the authors finalised the protocols by the end of 2017. A second workshop was organised in January 2018 to finalise and harmonise all protocols and agree on data presentation. In total, 115 scientists from 21 countries on four continents were involved.