Content area
Full text
Introduction
Climatology requires long-term data from many locations, consistent across both space and time. This requirement implies a lengthy chain of operations, including observation, recording, collection, transmission, quality control, reconciliation, storage, cataloguing, and access. Every link in this chain represents an information interface subject to data friction.
(Edwards, 2010, p. 84)
Over the last decade, climate scientists have engaged in a variety of international efforts to enhance the quality and quantity of meteorological data that constitute important global climate data sets such as the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS). Funding has been provided to aid the construction of some data sets, and various meteorological agencies have endorsed principles aimed at the full integration of weather and climate data networks in order to create a robust and sustainable climate data infrastructure. However, there remain many barriers to realising such a vision, and as Edwards (2010, p. 302) observes, a particularly “daunting task” is that of “refining and reconstructing the historical record”.
The current climatological record is relatively strong in some geographical regions such as the land regions of the northern hemisphere where detailed observational records can exist back to the late nineteenth century. However, the uneven development of meteorological observation and data archiving infrastructures around the world means that the historical data of many regions is sparse or non-existent. In order to deal with these gaps in the historical record, climate scientists can either generate synthetic data or recover archived data that are not yet integrated into international climate data sets. Scientists argue that by increasing the quantity and quality of observational data held in databases, the baseline for state of the art climate “reanalysis” will be enhanced, improving the integrity and reliability testing of climate models. One source of such data are historical ship logbooks in which crew members recorded detailed accounts of weather conditions at sea, and which are now stored as archival documents in different sites around the world.
While early efforts to integrate meteorological observation data from different archival sources concentrated on variables such as pressure, more recently work has been directed at synthesising marine and terrestrial surface temperature observation records from the last 200 years. The Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative aims to bring together people and...