Steven J. Worley

COADS Release 2 data and metadata enhancements for improvements of marine surface flux fields

Abstract The Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) has been updated through a cooperative U.S. project since 1981, including vital international contributions. Quality controlled marine surface observations from ships have been supplemented in more recent years to include moored environmental buoys, drifting buoys, and near-surface measurements from oceanographic profiles. The data set now covers 142 years, 1854–1995. Monthly statistics of pseudo-fluxes and basic marine variables are calculated for each year using observed data falling within 2° latitude × 2° longitude boxes (1°×1° summaries are also available for 1960-93). Enhancements in data and metadata planned by the year 2000 as part of COADS Release 2 (∼ 1820–1997) will concentrate on the basic observational records. In addition to new data sources, which will augment flux estimates through expanded coverage, planned enhancements include: a) usage of selected metadata from WMO Pub. No. 47 (ship instrumentation history) to improve the observational records back to about 1973; b) improvements in the reliability of the wind speed (“estimated/measured”) indicator; and c) bias adjustments of wind speed Beaufort estimates and anemometer measurements.

The Evolving SST Record from ICOADS

Sea surface temperature (SST) is a key oceanic variable – widely used for research, including global climate change assessments and atmospheric reanalyses. This paper reviews the evolution of the SST data and products available from the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), since that project’s inception in 1981. Climate-scale SST products based on ICOADS (or related in situ data) are also reviewed. Measurements of SST have been made since around the early 1800s from ships, augmented in recent decades by in situ measurements from buoys and other automated Ocean Data Acquisition Systems (ODAS). SST, unlike some other ICOADS variables such as surface air temperature or humidity, is observed from space with reasonable accuracy. However, without reference to in situ measurements most satellite-based SST products will contain large-scale biases due to varying atmospheric composition and imperfect instrumental calibration. ICOADS is vital to the removal of such biases, which are especially large following volcanic eruptions. We describe products combining in situ and satellite SSTs that exploit the strengths of each type of measurement, to yield both high resolution and high accuracy. Finally, we discuss future developments anticipated for ICOADS and SST products, such as further blending of metadata and enhanced product uncertainty assessments.

Peer Review of Datasets: When, Why, and How

AbstractPeer review holds a central place within the scientific communication system. Traditionally, research quality has been assessed by peer review of journal articles, conference proceedings, and books. There is strong support for the peer review process within the academic community, with scholars contributing peer reviews with little formal reward. Reviewing is seen as a contribution to the community as well as an opportunity to polish and refine understanding of the cutting edge of research. This paper discusses the applicability of the peer review process for assessing and ensuring the quality of datasets. Establishing the quality of datasets is a multifaceted task that encompasses many automated and manual processes. Adding research data into the publication and peer review queues will increase the stress on the scientific publishing system, but if done with forethought will also increase the trustworthiness and value of individual datasets, strengthen the findings based on cited datasets, and in...

Toward an integrated set of surface meteorological observations for climate science and applications

AbstractObservations are the foundation for understanding the climate system. Yet, currently available land meteorological data are highly fractured into various global, regional, and national holdings for different variables and time scales, from a variety of sources, and in a mixture of formats. Added to this, many data are still inaccessible for analysis and usage. To meet modern scientific and societal demands as well as emerging needs such as the provision of climate services, it is essential that we improve the management and curation of available land-based meteorological holdings. We need a comprehensive global set of data holdings, of known provenance, that is truly integrated both across essential climate variables (ECVs) and across time scales to meet the broad range of stakeholder needs. These holdings must be easily discoverable, made available in accessible formats, and backed up by multitiered user support. The present paper provides a high-level overview, based upon broad community input, ...

Advances in the Use of Historical Marine Climate Data

SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION AND RECOM-MENDATIONS. Discussions were held in breakout groups, each focusing on a range of marine variables, and the following key conclusions were drawn:• An overarching recommendation was for con-tinuing augmentation of ICOADS with in situ marine meteorological data and enhanced links to ocean data repositories, such as the World Ocean Database (e.g., Levitus et al. 1998). At least 25 million undigitized ship logbook reports exist, for instance, in U.K. national archives. In view of scarce resources, the need for data inventories and assessments to help identify priorities for digitiza-tion and datasets for incorporation into ICOADS was also highlighted.• Concern was expressed that the marine obser-vation system is in decline. Observations from VOS have decreased by more than a half since 1990, and there are now fewer than a third of the number of VOS participating in the program. As a result, the uncertainty of in situ surface products is increasing. All of the discussion groups were concerned about the diminishing data quantities, which represent a huge challenge for the future. It is essential that the marine climate community makes assessments both of its future data require-ments and the adequacy of the surface marine climate observing system, and feeds this infor-mation through to the appropriate operational bodies.562 |

NOAA CIRES Twentieth Century Global Reanalysis Version 2

The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project, supported by the Earth System Research Laboratory Physical Sciences Division from NOAA and the University of Colorado CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, is an effort to produce a global reanalysis dataset spanning a portion of the nineteenth century and the entire twentieth century (1871 - near present), assimilating only surface observations of synoptic pressure, monthly sea surface temperature and sea ice distribution. Products include 6-hourly ensemble mean and spread analysis fields on a 2 by 2 degree global latitude-longitude grid, and 3 and 6-hourly ensemble mean and spread forecast (first guess) fields on a global Gaussian T62 grid. Fields are accessible in yearly time series (1 file per parameter) and monthly synoptic time (all parameters per synoptic hour) files. Ensemble grids, spectral coefficients, and other information will available by offline request in the future.\n\n The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which are supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 and Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725, respectively.\n\nNote: Version 2c of this reanalysis (running from 1851 - 2011) is the recommended research version. Please see ds131.2 to access Version 2c.

Improving High‐Impact Weather Forecasts

To accelerate improvements in 1- to 14-day high-impact weather forecasts, the World Meteorological Organizations (WMO) World Weather Research Programme established the Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment (THORPEX) Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE) in 2005. The key objectives of TIGGE are enhancing international collaboration on ensemble prediction, determining new methods for combining ensembles from different sources, gaining a deeper understanding of forecast error and the feasibility of interactive ensemble systems, and developing a prototype for a future Global Interactive Forecasting System (GIFS).

Research Center Insights into Data Curation Education and Curriculum

The need for the data curator role is being recognized in new institutional settings as research funding agencies internationally extend data archiving mandates to cover more types of research grants. This paper identifies categories of skills required for data curator from the perspective of data professionals within an atmospheric and Earth system science research center. We illustrate how the data curation tasks performed within a research center environment range across a spectrum of required skills. We use this spectrum to discuss implications for data curation education more broadly.

International Surface Pressure Databank (ISPDv2)

The International Surface Pressure Databank (ISPD; Cram et al. 2015) [http://reanalyses.org/observations/international-surface-pressure-databank] is the worlds largest collection of pressure observations. It has been gathered through international cooperation with data recovery facilitated by the ACRE Initiative and the other contributing organizations and assembled under the auspices of the GCOS Working Group on Surface Pressure and the WCRP/GCOS Working Group on Observational Data Sets for Reanalysis by NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL), NOAAs National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and the Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC) of the University of Colorados Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). The ISPDv2 consists of three components: station, marine, and tropical cyclone best track pressure observations. The station component is a blend of many national and international collections.\n\nNOTE: A newer version of this dataset, the International Surface Pressure Databank version 3, is available in RDA dataset ds132.1 [http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds132.1/]. Users are recommended to access this updated dataset.\n\nThe Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center [http://www.nersc.gov/] and of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility [http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/] at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which are supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 and Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725, respectively.

The international surface temperature initiative's global land surface databank

The International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) consists of an end-to-end process for land surface air temperature analyses. The foundation is the establishment of a global land surface Databank. This builds upon the groundbreaking efforts of scientists in the 1980s and 1990s. While using many of their principles, a primary aim is to improve aspects including data provenance, version control, openness and transparency, temporal and spatial coverage, and improved methods for merging disparate sources. The initial focus is on daily and monthly timescales. A Databank Working Group is focused on establishing Stage-0 (original observation forms) through Stage-3 data (merged dataset without quality control). More than 35 sources of data have already been added and efforts have now turned to development of the initial version of the merged dataset. Methods have been established for ensuring to the extent possible the provenance of all data from the point of observation through all intermediate steps to f...