Tom Ross

The Comprehensive Historical Upper-Air Network

To better understand variability in weather and climate, it is vital to address past atmospheric circulation. This need requires meteorological information not just from the surface but also at upper levels. Current global upper-level datasets only reach back to the 1940s or 1950s and do not cover some important periods in the first half of the twentieth century. Extending the observational record is therefore considered important in order to analyze climate variability in the past and verify global climate models used to predict future climate change. Although earlier upper-air data from platforms such as radiosondes, aircraft, pilot balloons, registering balloons, and kites are available from various sources, no systematic compilation and quality assessment of upper-level data prior to the International Geophysical Year (1957/58) has ever been performed. Here we present the Comprehensive Historical Upper-Air Network (CHUAN). It is a consistent global historical upper-air dataset that has been derived fr...

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.

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.