date: Thu Sep 2 15:53:19 2004
from: Phil Jones
subject: Re: Notes from Friday
to: "Brohan, Philip"
Philip,
I'll look at these tomorrow. Have forwarded to Harry. His email is i.harris@uea.ac.uk .
Cheers
Phil
At 14:50 02/09/2004, you wrote:
Hi Phil.
It was good to talk to you on Friday, and to hear that the HadCRUT3
work is starting. As promised, my notes from the meeting are below.
Regards,
Philip
The CRU contract is nearly signed off. Phil realised that another person
had to sign it, and this is being done. We have been sending our
correspondence to the wrong address, it is going, correctly, to Alicia
Meldrum, but she is at the University Registry, not at CRU.
Phil has added some new data to the Jones file, mostly from Antarctica,
through the READER project at BAS. Harry has also started work, he is
merging in some new data for Mali and for the Congo (ex Zaire). Harry is
also digitalising the old records of corrections applied at CRU. Phil
has obtained lists of corrections from Canada and corrected and
uncorrected data (do-it-yourself correction lists) from both Austria and
Switzerland. We will use this to calculate statistics on the frequency
and magnitude of corrections.
Harry is also planning to go through the data looking for outliers
(values more than 5-10C from what they should be) by comparison with
climatology and re-analyses. We will collect statistics on these as
well. We need to use these data to estimate the frequency of smaller
transcription errors (~ 1C); we are not yet sure exactly how to do this.
We discussed the climatology uncertainties. Only about 10% of the
stations don't have a good climatology; in these cases climatologies are
constructed from pre 1961-90 data and corrected to the 1961-90 period
by comparison with nearby stations with more data. We can estimate the
uncertainties by making similar estimates for stations which do have
1961-90 climatologies, and looking at the differences.
To extend the Folland et al. 2001 treatment of urbanisation uncertainty
from global to regional scales we need a spatially and temporally
resolved urbanisation dataset. Phil suggested I contact Tom Peterson at
NCDC and ask about their night-lights dataset. (I should read his paper
in J. Clim first (vol 16 no. 18 pp2941-59)).
Phil gave me some information on the header formats in his station data
files. I will add this information to our system documentation.
I will get in touch with Harry (i.harris@uea.ac.uk). He should probably
come to Exeter in a month or so.
--
Philip Brohan, Climate Scientist
Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
Tel: +44 (0)1392 884574 Fax: +44 (0)1392 885681
Email: philip.brohan@metoffice.com [1]http://www.metoffice.com
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK
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