Colin Morice

An Investigation into the Impact of using Various Techniques to Estimate Arctic Surface Air Temperature Anomalies

AbstractTime series of global and regional mean surface air temperature (SAT) anomalies are a common metric used to estimate recent climate change. Various techniques can be used to create these time series from meteorological station data. The degree of difference arising from using five different techniques, based on existing temperature anomaly dataset techniques, to estimate Arctic SAT anomalies over land and sea ice was investigated using reanalysis data as a test bed. Techniques that interpolated anomalies were found to result in smaller errors than noninterpolating techniques relative to the reanalysis reference. Kriging techniques provided the smallest errors in estimates of Arctic anomalies, and simple kriging was often the best kriging method in this study, especially over sea ice. A linear interpolation technique had, on average, root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) up to 0.55 K larger than the two kriging techniques tested. Noninterpolating techniques provided the least representative anomaly estim...

Estimating the Transient Climate Response from Observed Warming

AbstractThe transient climate response (TCR) quantifies the warming expected during a transient doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Many previous studies quantifying the ob...