Transcript Analysis of Surface Temperature: UKMO Workshop Summary Stephan Bojinski, GCOS Secretariat GCOS SC-XVIII, 30 Sep 2010

Analysis of Surface
Temperature:
UKMO Workshop Summary
Stephan Bojinski, GCOS Secretariat
GCOS SC-XVIII, 30 Sep 2010
Background
 Society expects openness and transparency in the
understanding of the (un)certainty on how climate has
changed and how it will continue to change
 UKMO-led “Proposal for a new International Analysis of LandSurface Air Temperature Data”, endorsed by WMO
Commission for Climatology, 15th session, February 2010
 12 white papers solicited, with international authorship, and
open comment period
 Moderated blog
 http://www.surfacetemperatures.org
Workshop 7-9 Sep 2010
 Hosted by UKMO Hadley Centre, Exeter
 Sponsored by WMO, WCRP, GCOS, UK Royal
Meteorological Society, UKMO, University of Exeter,
NOAA NCDC, US GCOS Office
 >80 participants, including from NCDC, CRU, UKMO,
DWD, JMA, CMA, MeteoFrance, Canada, India,
Indonesia, Kenya, Australia, WMO CCl, GCOS SC and
Secretariat, WCRP, SST community, metrology
community, statistics community, IT community
Workshop Topics
1. Creation and maintenance of a databank
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Retrieval of historical data, Data rescue
Near real-time updates of databank
Data policy
Data provenance, version control, configuration management
2. Analysis, creation of datasets, and performance assessment
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Creation of quality controlled homogenised datasets from the databank
Benchmarking homogenisation algorithm performance against test cases
Dataset algorithm performance assessment based upon all efforts
Spatial and temporal interpolation
3. Publication, presentation and outreach
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Publication, collation of results, presentation of audit trails
Solicitation of input from the community at large, including non-climate fields and
discussion of web presence
Governance
Interactions with other activities
Results to date
 Major discussion points:
 Databank design would focus on surface temperature,
but also hold data on other variables
 Databank would include sub-daily (SYNOP, METAR),
daily (TBD) and monthly data (CLIMAT)
 Centralized vs distributed
 Only openly available data vs including data subject to
restriction
 Unified or flexible metadata structure
 Would include different “stages” (“levels”) of data
 Digitization and data rescue using “crowdsourcing”
 Data access
Results to date
 Ad-hoc teams formed on
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Governance (WMO rep to be found)
Databank and data access
Benchmarking and performance assessment
Scientific outreach and value-adding
Interpolation methods
 Ad-hoc steering group (proposed Chair: Peter Thorne),
with members from workshop organizing committee,
sponsors (incl. GCOS), other participants
 To come up with an implementation roadmap by October
2011 (WCRP Open Science Conference)