Some Ideas For Future Reanalysis Efforts
John Lanzante
Some Progress
- In our earlierst work, LKS (Lanzante, Klein, Seidel, 2003; Part 1, Part 2)
have devised and applied a scheme to make homogeneity adjustments for
long time series of radiosonde temperature. Comparisons with independent
satellite MSU data suggest an improvement via adjustment. An example, at
Pechora, Russia, shows that after adjustment the radiosonde series are much more
similar to MSU temperatures. - LKS find a systematic bias in that unadjusted data have spurious cooling trends
in both the troposphere and stratosphere. - Diagnostic work (Lanzante 2007; Lanzante and Free 2008) with GFDL and
CMIP3 GCM climate change experiments suggests data adjustment may influence
detection/attribution of global change — adjustment typically leads to better
agreement with GCMs. - Subsequent work by ourselves and others has led to the development of 5 distinct
homogenized radiosonde temperature datasets (RATPAC; HadAT2; IUK;
RAOBCORE; RICH). Unfortunately it is not possible to demonstate which of
these products is the “best”, since currently there is no “gold standard” against
which to evalutate them. Therefore, most analysts seeking trend estimates
will use all 5 datasets and compare results for consistency. It would obviously be
desireable to have one “best” climate quality product.
