Many of these issues were discussed in a recent workshop on “Datasets for the
21 st Century” held at the United Kingdom Meteorological Office in Exeter, U.K. The aim
of the workshop was stated as an international and multi-discipline effort to build the
framework to construct high quality, high resolution, transparent, fully reproducible, and
robustly verified climate records and to ensure their usefulness for decision makers and
society. The workshop was sponsored by the World Meteorological Office with co-
sponsorship from a number of other meteorological and environmental agencies. The
home page for the World Meteorological Office (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk) provides
links to papers discussing numerous aspects of both the administrative and scientific
components of preparing climate data products.
From an administrative point of view, a major issue is the availability of raw data
and computer programs for processing the data. The recent publicity associated with the
leakage of emails from the University of East Anglia related to climate change has drawn
attention to the problems that arise when raw data and programs are not readily
available to other researchers who may desire to understand or challenge the
assumptions made in constructing climate data products such as gridded temperature
averages. In response, the climate community has recognized the need to provide
access to raw data, but there are problems; for example, not all the World’s
meteorological agencies are willing to make raw data publicly available. From a scientific
point of view, two major issues are correcting data sets for spurious trends and
changepoints and choosing interpolation methods for constructing gridded averages.
Fig. 1 illustrates the issues associated with constructing gridded datasets: the observing
grid is primarily land based and not at all uniformly distributed, reflecting different
priorities and political systems in the countries that collect the data.
Figure. 1. Part of the European network of temperature measurement stations. Reprinted from “A
European daily high-resolution gridded data set of surface temperature and precipitation for 1950
- 2006,” Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 113, Oct. 30 2008, with permission from
American Geophysical Union.