World temperature records available via Google Earth
Climate researchers at the University of East Anglia have made the world’s temperature records available via Google Earth.
The Climatic Research Unit Temperature Version 4 (CRUTEM4) land-surface air temperature dataset is one of the most widely used records of the climate system.
The new Google Earth format allows users to scroll around the world, zoom in on 6,000 weather stations, and view monthly, seasonal and annual temperature data more easily than ever before.
Users can drill down to see some 20,000 graphs – some of which show temperature records dating back to 1850.
The move is part of an ongoing effort to make data about past climate and climate change as accessible and transparent as possible.
Dr Tim Osborn from UEA’s Climatic Research Unit said: “The beauty of using Google Earth is that you can instantly see where the weather stations are, zoom in on specific countries, and see station datasets much more clearly.
“The data itself comes from the latest CRUTEM4 figures, which have been freely available on our website and via the Met Office. But we wanted to make this key temperature dataset as interactive and user-friendly as possible.”
The Google Earth interface shows how the globe has been split into 5° latitude and longitude grid boxes. The boxes are about 550km wide along the Equator, narrowing towards the North and South poles. This red and green checkerboard covers most of the Earth and indicates areas of land where station data are available. Clicking on a grid box reveals the area’s annual temperatures, as well as links to more detailed downloadable station data.
But while the new initiative does allow greater accessibility, the research team do expect to find errors.
Dr Osborn said: “This dataset combines monthly records from 6,000 weather stations around the world – some of which date back more than 150 years. That’s a lot of data, so we would expect to see a few errors. We very much encourage people to alert us to any records that seem unusual.
“There are some gaps in the grid – this is because there are no weather stations in remote areas such as the Sahara. Users may also spot that the location of some weather stations is not exact. This is because the information we have about the latitude and longitude of each station is limited to 1 decimal place, so the station markers could be a few kilometres from the actual location.
“This isn’t a problem scientifically because the temperature records do not depend on the precise location of each station. But it is something which will improve over time as more detailed location information becomes available.”
This new initiative is described in a new research paper published on February 4 in the journal Earth System Science Data (Osborn T.J. and Jones P.D., 2014: The CRUTEM4 land-surface air temperature dataset: construction, previous versions and dissemination via Google Earth).
For instructions about accessing and using the CRUTEM Google Earth interface (and to find out more about the project) visit http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem/ge/. To view the new Google Earth interface download Google Earth, then click here CRUTEM4-2013-03_gridboxes.kml.
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Patrick says:
February 8, 2014 at 1:31 am
>”Ignore anything NIWA says about climate.”
Know what you mean but it’s not ALL bad, you just have to be careful with what you do access from NIWA. For example, the NZCSET audit of the their 7SS agrees with NIWA since about 1970. It is only really the pre-1970 adjustments that are contentious. BEST doesn’t provide a trend from 1970 but does for 1990 when NIWA’s series is fully acceptable. So the comparison for New Zealand is:
0.24 °C / Decade BEST NZ 1990 – Nov 2013
0.265 °C / Decade NIWA NZ 1990 – end 2013 (2013 was an exceptionally warm year)
0.21 °C / Decade NIWA NZ 1990 – end 2012
Reasonable except it’s not apples-to-apples,
11 °C BEST’s latest NZ temps on average
13 °C NIWA’s latest NZ temps on average
It’s the same all over NZ, BEST’s absolute temps are wildly at odds with the observations at each location whether in-situ or adjusted and some of the other trends are way out e.g. Hamilton:
0.01 °C/decade NIWA Ruakura (Hamilton) 1970 – 2009 (post 1970 – this isn’t dodgy)
0.107 °C/decade BEST Hamilton 1970 – 2009 using 1960 – pres trend
10.7 times more slope in BEST there (maybe the 1960 – 1970 decade skews the slope in BEST).
.
Don’t be too hasty throwing ALL of NIWA’s work away Patrick, their post-1970 7SS is a very useful check of BEST for example. Problem with CRUTEM4 as we’ve discovered up-thread is CRU uses the entire adjusted 7SS, and the 11SS:
‘Station data used for generating CRUTEM4′ – ‘CRUTEM4 Temperature station data’
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/crutem4/station-data.htm
Code, Station Count, Regions, Sources (paper, project acronym or website)
41, 13, New Zealand, Homogenized series , NIWA, New Zealand
http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/nz-temp-record
‘Seven-station’ series – 7SS, ‘Eleven-station’ series – 11SS
CRU don’t start with raw data now for NZ in CRUTEM4, they use the NIWA adjusted 7SS and 11SS directly.
“The Pompous Git says:
February 8, 2014 at 11:08 am
In 1984 IBM’s released the 3480 cartridge tape system as a replacement for the traditional magnetic tape reels. It was a 4” x 5” cartridge that held more information than reels the capacity being 200MB. They were slow to catch on though, so I suspect that the tapes Jones’s predecessor recycled would have been reels.”
Exactly right! Jones and the CRU had the technology availavle then to conduct proper data archiving even if they only had access to 3470 tape reels. Heck I worked for IBM in the late 80’s and we still had 3470 reels. I am pretty sure 360kb 3.5″ floppies were not available in 1984. 5.25″ most likely. I reckon one 12″ reel would have been sufficient enough to store a bunch of numbers for temperature given then we were able to back up entire 16MB address spaces (24bit addressing MVS) on tape.
Simply no excuse to LOSE the data your product and “science” is based on ESPECIALLY on such a sensitive subject, ie, global warming.
@ur momisugly Patrick
I was using 3.5 ” floppies ca. 1984. They were single sided and cost about $AU10 each. However, IIRC it was Tom Wigley’s watch when the data got “lost”, not Phil Jones’. Did Wigley make the decision? Did the IT department give Wigley a choice of saving X or Y? Will we ever know what really happened?
I don’t recall global warming being a hot topic (so to speak) back in those days. Climatology only really started becoming newsworthy late in the decade/early 90s which was when I was first interviewed about global warming on Radio National.
“The Pompous Git says:
February 8, 2014 at 6:50 pm”
It certainly was a hot topic in the UK along with acid rain and the UK being labelled the “dirty man of Europe” because of sulfur emissions (Now CO2 is the bogeyman) from, primarily, industrial power plants (Coal fired) and their impact on the environment and global warming. The term is still used today. Global warming became politicised in the 90’s, and thus, more widely discussed mostly due to the fact that politicians and environmental groups like Greenpeace/Friends of The Earth etc were constantly bleeting on and on about it.
Regardless, whoever was in the driving seat at the CRU didn’t protect that data. That’s BS (Bad Science) and should treated as such.
Nick Stokes: I was using 9-track magnetic tape in 1984. IBM introduced 9-track tape in 1964. Magnetic tape is a surprisingly tolerant and reliable media for digital data storage – we still archive our datasets on the modern equivalent of DAT tape even today as it is more reliable then CD and DVD, especially for large files sizes.
A standard 2400 ft reel of 1/2 inch, 9-track tape will store up to a maximum of 170 Mb of data, but more typically stores about 100+ Mb of data at typical block sizes.
So, no excuses for CRU then. They spent all that time and effort typing in records but couldn’t keep the equivalent of 1 x 2400 ft tape reel of data, using available technology that was at least 15 years old at the start of the 1980’s, technology that was still in regular use until the end of the 1990’s?
Give me a break.