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Page 24
4—
Recommendations
In order to monitor global climate change on a decade-to-decade
basis in support of national and foreign policy decisions, it will
be necessary to better quantify and to substantially reduce the
measurement errors inherent in estimates of global-mean
temperature, as well as to develop an improved understanding of the
processes that contribute to short term variability of global-mean
temperature. To achieve these goals, the panel recommends the
following actions:
(1) The nations of the world should implement a substantially
improved temperature monitoring systems10 that ensures the continuity and
quality of critically important data sets. Needed measurements
include not only the conventional climatic variables (temperature
and precipitation), but also the time-varying, three-dimensional
spatial fields of ozone, water vapor, clouds, and aerosols, all of
which have the potential to cause surface and lower to
mid-tropospheric temperatures to change relative to one another.
Management of climate data sets also needs additional attention and
support. Raw and processed measurements and follow-on products need
to be accessible in a form that enables a number of different
research groups to replicate the processing of the more widely
disseminated datacontinue
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OCR for page 24
Page 24
4—
Recommendations
In order to monitor global climate change on a decade-to-decade
basis in support of national and foreign policy decisions, it will
be necessary to better quantify and to substantially reduce the
measurement errors inherent in estimates of global-mean
temperature, as well as to develop an improved understanding of the
processes that contribute to short term variability of global-mean
temperature. To achieve these goals, the panel recommends the
following actions:
(1) The nations of the world should implement a substantially
improved temperature monitoring systems10 that ensures the continuity and
quality of critically important data sets. Needed measurements
include not only the conventional climatic variables (temperature
and precipitation), but also the time-varying, three-dimensional
spatial fields of ozone, water vapor, clouds, and aerosols, all of
which have the potential to cause surface and lower to
mid-tropospheric temperatures to change relative to one another.
Management of climate data sets also needs additional attention and
support. Raw and processed measurements and follow-on products need
to be accessible in a form that enables a number of different
research groups to replicate the processing of the more widely
disseminated datacontinue
10 The NRC
report Adequacy of Climate Observing Systems (NRC, 1999)
describes characteristics that should be incorporated into the
design of climate monitoring systems to facilitate the detection of
climate change.
OCR for page 25
Page 25
sets and to develop new and improved temperature algorithms. To
ensure such access, the ongoing documentation of instrumentation
and observing practices, the archiving of data sets, and the
provision of raw and processed data sets in electronic form to the
scientific community should be regarded as integral parts of the
climate monitoring effort and afforded high priority in terms of
funding.
(2) The scientific community should perform a more
comprehensive analysis of the uncertainties inherent in the
surface, radiosonde, and satellite data sets. Such an
assessment should involve a detailed analysis of the sensitivity of
global-mean temperatures derived from these three different
measurement systems to the various choices made in the processing
of the raw data—e.g., corrections for instrument changes,
adjustments for orbital decay effects in the satellite
measurements, and procedures for interpolating station data onto
grids. Such studies should also address the comparison of data sets
with different sampling characteristics.
(3) Natural as well as human-induced changes should be taken
into account in climate model simulations of atmospheric
temperature variability on the decade-to-decade time scale. In
particular, the studies described in Finding #4 need to be repeated
with improved models and with an experimental design that reflects
the uncertainties in natural and human-induced forcings.
(4) The scientific community should explore the possibility
of exploiting the sophisticated protocols that are now routinely
used to ensure the quality control and consistency of the data
ingested into operational numerical weather prediction models, to
improve the reliability of the data sets used to monitor global
climate change.break
OCR for page 26
Representative terms from entire chapter:
station data
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