Workshop on the advances in the use of historical marine climate data

• Main Authors: Henry Diaz, Chris Foll, Teruko Manabe, David Parker, Richard Reynolds, Scott Woodruff
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.526.7421; http://icoads.noaa.gov/offprint.pdf

and was sponsored by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) and WMO. Scope The overall intention was to build on the recent blend of the US Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) with the Met Office Marine Data Bank and several million newly digitized data. This blend provides the climate research community with an unprecedented assembly of in situ marine data. There have been major improvements in data availability up to the mid-20th century. The new observational archive has been named the Interna-tional Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (I-COADS). Proceedings The Workshop began with presentations on histori-cal marine datasets, sea-surface temperature (SST) and sea ice, marine air temperature, mean sea-level pressure (MSLP) and wind, and recommendations from the second CLIVAR Climate of the Twentieth Century (C20C) Workshop. Three breakout groups covered SST, air temperature and sea-ice; MSLP and wind; and technical requirements. These groups made recommendations, summarized below. General background to the recommendations includes the need to reduce the remaining biases in the data; to increase, where possible, coverage and temporal res-olution; to specify uncertainty in analyses; to distin-guish versions of datasets; and to promote easy access to all data. A staged timetable for implementa-tion was agreed: firstly, a two-year period would lead to the third C20C Workshop around April 2004; and, secondly, a period of about five years would lead to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).