Tuesday 29 March 2016

Upcoming meetings on climate data quality


It looks like 2016 will be a year full of interesting conferences. I already pointed you to EGU, IMSC and EMS before. Here is an update with three upcoming European meetings, including two close deadlines.

The marine climate data community will hold its main workshop this July (18 to 22). The deadline has just been prolonged to the 6th of April, Wednesday next week.

The metrologists (no typo) organize a meeting on climate data, MMC2016. It will take place from 26 to 30 September and will be organized together with the WMO TECO conference.

And naturally we will have the European Meteorological Society meeting in Autumn. This year is an ECAC year (European Conference on Applied Climatology). The abstract submission deadline is in about three weeks, 21 Apr 2016, during EGU. So start writing soon. As always we will have a session on "Climate monitoring; data rescue, management, quality and homogenization" for the homogenization addicted readers of this blog.

If you know of more interesting conferences, do add them in the comments.

MARCDAT-IV

The Fourth International Workshop on the Advances in the Use of Historical Marine Climate Data (MARCDAT-IV) will be held at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK between the 18th and 22nd July 2016. The workshop will be arranged around the following themes:
  • Data homogenization (benchmarking, bias adjustments, step change analysis, metadata)
  • Quantification and estimation of uncertainty
  • Data management, recovery and reprocessing (digitisation efforts and reprocessing of previously digitised data)
  • Reconstructing past climates
  • Integrating In-situ / satellite data sources
  • Consistency of the climate across domain boundaries (land, ocean, surface, subsurface, atmosphere)
  • The role of ICOADS and applications of marine climate data
  • Review of the 10-year action plan
This looks like an invitation of people working on land data to also participate. I just asked some colleagues on the homogenization list and it looks like there are a decent number of weather stations near the coast. We could compare them to marine observations, I would especially be interested in comparing sea surface temperature observations.

This workshop is free to attend, but participants must register.

Key Dates:
Abstract submission deadline: 8th April 2016
Registration closes: 31st May 2016

MMC-2016

International workshop on Metrology for Meteorology and Climate in conjunction with WMO TECO 2016 conference & Meteorological Technology World Expo 2016. It will be held in Madrid Spain from 26 to 30 September 2016.
During the last years an increasing collaboration has been established between the Metrology and Meteorology communities. EURAMET, the European association of metrology Institutes, is funding several projects aiming at delivering results of valuable impact for the meteorology and climatology science. The key aspect of such projects is the traceability of measurements and uncertainties of measured physical and chemical quantities describing the earth atmosphere. The MMC conference aims to give an opportunity to those two communities to present and discuss needs, methods, expertise and devices for cooperating in producing better data. The invitation is addressed to the metrology, meteorology and climate scientific communities and operators. Starting with the first MMC 2014 in Brdo, Slovenia, this time the MMC 2016 is organized Madrid, Spain, in conjunction with CIMO-TECO conference.
As far as I know the abstract deadline has not been determined yet, but write the date into your agenda, bookmark the homepage and contact the organizers to give you a notice once the deadline is known.

EMS2016

The conference theme of the Annual Meeting of the European Meteorological Society is: Where atmosphere, sea and land meet: bridging between sciences, applications and stakeholders. It will be held from 12 to 16 September 2016 in Trieste, Italy. The abstract submission deadline is 21 April 2016, during EGU2016.

MC1 Climate monitoring; data rescue, management, quality and homogenization
Convener: Manola Brunet-India
Co-Conveners: Hermann Mächel, Victor Venema, Ingeborg Auer, Dan Hollis 
Robust and reliable climatic studies, particularly those assessments dealing with climate variability and change, greatly depend on availability and accessibility to high-quality/high-resolution and long-term instrumental climate data. At present, a restricted availability and accessibility to long-term and high-quality climate records and datasets is still limiting our ability to better understand, detect, predict and respond to climate variability and change at lower spatial scales than global. In addition, the need for providing reliable, opportune and timely climate services deeply relies on the availability and accessibility to high-quality and high-resolution climate data, which also requires further research and innovative applications in the areas of data rescue techniques and procedures, data management systems, climate monitoring, climate time-series quality control and homogenisation.

In this session, we welcome contributions (oral and poster) in the following major topics:
  • Climate monitoring , including early warning systems and improvements in the quality of the observational meteorological networks
  • More efficient transfer of the data rescued into the digital format by means of improving the current state-of-the-art on image enhancement, image segmentation and post-correction techniques, innovating on adaptive Optical Character Recognition and Speech Recognition technologies and their application to transfer data, defining best practices about the operational context for digitisation, improving techniques for inventorying, organising, identifying and validating the data rescued, exploring crowd-sourcing approaches or engaging citizen scientist volunteers, conserving, imaging, inventorying and archiving historical documents containing weather records
  • Climate data and metadata processing, including climate data flow management systems, from improved database models to better data extraction, development of relational metadata databases and data exchange platforms and networks interoperability
  • Innovative, improved and extended climate data quality controls (QC), including both near real-time and time-series QCs: from gross-errors and tolerance checks to temporal and spatial coherence tests, statistical derivation and machine learning of QC rules, and extending tailored QC application to monthly, daily and sub-daily data and to all essential climate variables
  • Improvements to the current state-of-the-art of climate data homogeneity and homogenisation methods, including methods intercomparison and evaluation, along with other topics such as climate time-series inhomogeneities detection and correction techniques/algorithms (either absolute or relative approaches), using parallel measurements to study inhomogeneities and extending approaches to detect/adjust monthly and, especially, daily and sub-daily time-series and to homogenise all essential climate variables
  • Fostering evaluation of the uncertainty budget in reconstructed time-series, including the influence of the various data processes steps, and analytical work and numerical estimates using realistic benchmarking datasets
Next to this session, readers of this blog may also like: Climate change detection, assessment of trends, variability and extremes. And I personally like the session on Spatial Climatology, which has a lot to do with structure and variability.




Top photo by Martin Duggan, which has a CC BY 2.0 license.

3 comments:

  1. Your comment that there are a decent number of weather stations on the coast and they could usefully be compared to marine observations is interesting.

    I live very close to the English south coast and have two such stations very close by. For there to be a useful comparison the methodology, instrumentation and observation quality must be similar.

    I wonder if a properly trained marine observer ( excluding taking SST's) is superior to the amateurs commonly taking coastal records with, in certain eras, pressure from the tourist board to produce 'good' weather?

    Add to this the bias of the instrumentation. I had an example of this when I noticed that our 'rival' resort down the coast was , all of a sudden, much sunnier and warmer than ours. There was some debate in the Daily telegraph about this and it turned out that the rival resort had purchased new equipment in order to meet new met office specifications. These would record, for example, what was no more than a day with some brightness, as a mostly sunny day. Temperatures also leapt up by up to a degree.

    So correlating coastal and marine observations sounds worthwhile but I do wonder if you might be comparing apples and oranges unless a check on the quality of the data can be made

    Tonyb

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tony, yes, it will be difficult. That is also why it has not been done before. The marine observations are also typically made by volunteers. We may have to compute the temperature on days that the wind comes from the sea. Biases are no problem for trends, only changes in biases.

    The trend in the land surface temperature is also different from the trend in sea surface temperature. Not sure how large this difference is at the coast. Possibly we need to use methods that do not adjust small trend differences. Let's see if we can get it working.

    I was thinking of official weather stations. In Germany we have a weather company that prefers to put its stations at bad locations so that they can get into the news more often with record values. I think they also often work for tourist agencies.

    Especially estimates of sun shine duration vary enormously between Campbell Stokes observations and modern radiation measurements.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Victor

    Good luck with this intriguing project. Yes, the problem at our local resort was that they stayed with the old (and reliable) equipment whilst the rival resort had the newest. When the newspaper reported that they were the sunniest place in the country two days in a row whilst our resort was merely bright I drove the four miles there the next day, saw it was merely bright, but sure enough it was reported that there had been some relight hours of sunshine!

    When reading a US weather review journal from around 1880 I noticed there was an article from the weather observers where they noted that one type of thermometer was consistently warmer than another by several degrees.

    Trying to make sense of these biases must be problematic.

    Tonyb

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