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Archives for August 2017

Data rescue projects

17 Aug 2017 by Gavin

It’s often been said that while we can only gather new data about the planet at the rate of one year per year, rescuing old data can add far more data more quickly. Data rescue is however extremely labor intensive. Nonetheless there are multiple data rescue projects and citizen science efforts ongoing, some of which we have highlighted here before. For those looking for an intro into the subject, this 2014 article is an great introduction.



Weather diary from the the Observatoire de Paris, written by Giovanni Cassini on 18th January 1789.

I was asked this week whether there was a list of these projects, and with a bit of help from Twitter, we came up with the following:

  • Old Weather (@oldweather)
  • Weather Detective (closing soon)
  • Weather Rescue
  • NOAA Climate Database Modernization Program
  • New Zealand (@DeepSouth_NZ)
  • The International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO)
  • Atmospheric Circulation Reconstruction over the Earth (@met_acre)
  • The International Data Rescue Portal (i-Dare)
  • Met Éirann (poster)
  • Historical Climatology (list of more databases)
  • Data Rescue at home
  • Historical Canadian data
  • SE Australia Recent Climate History (no longer active?)
  • Congo basin eco-climatological data recovery and valorisation (COBECORE)
  • The climate and environmental history collaborative research environment (Tambora)

(If you know of any more, please add them in the comments, and I’ll try and keep this list up to date).

Filed Under: Climate Science, Instrumental Record, Scientific practice

Sensible Questions on Climate Sensitivity

15 Aug 2017 by group

Guest Commentary by Cristian Proistosescu, Peter Huybers and Kyle Armour

tl;dr 

Two recent papers help bridge a seeming gap between estimates of climate sensitivity from models and from observations of the global energy budget. Recognizing that equilibrium climate sensitivity cannot be directly observed because Earth’s energy balance is a long way from equilibrium, the studies instead focus on what can be inferred about climate sensitivity from historical trends. Calculating a climate sensitivity from the simulations that is directly comparable with that observed shows both are consistent. Crucial questions remain, however, regarding how climate sensitivity will evolve in the future.

[Read more…] about Sensible Questions on Climate Sensitivity

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Instrumental Record

Observations, Reanalyses and the Elusive Absolute Global Mean Temperature

10 Aug 2017 by Gavin

One of the most common questions that arises from analyses of the global surface temperature data sets is why they are almost always plotted as anomalies and not as absolute temperatures.

There are two very basic answers: First, looking at changes in data gets rid of biases at individual stations that don’t change in time (such as station location), and second, for surface temperatures at least, the correlation scale for anomalies is much larger (100’s km) than for absolute temperatures. The combination of these factors means it’s much easier to interpolate anomalies and estimate the global mean, than it would be if you were averaging absolute temperatures. This was explained many years ago (and again here).

Of course, the absolute temperature does matter in many situations (the freezing point of ice, emitted radiation, convection, health and ecosystem impacts, etc.) and so it’s worth calculating as well – even at the global scale. However, and this is important, because of the biases and the difficulty in interpolating, the estimates of the global mean absolute temperature are not as accurate as the year to year changes.

This means we need to very careful in combining these two analyses – and unfortunately, historically, we haven’t been and that is a continuing problem.

[Read more…] about Observations, Reanalyses and the Elusive Absolute Global Mean Temperature

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Instrumental Record, Scientific practice, statistics

Unforced Variations: August 2017

2 Aug 2017 by group

This month’s open thread.

Filed Under: Climate Science, Open thread

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