We developed interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas (excluding Antarctica) at a spatial resolution of 30 arc s (often referred to as 1-km spatial resolution). The climate elements considered were monthly precipitation and mean, minimum, and maximum temperature. Input data were gathered from a variety of sources and, where possible, were restricted to records from the 1950–2000 period. We used the thin-plate smoothing spline algorithm implemented in the ANUSPLIN package for interpolation, using latitude, longitude, and elevation as independent variables. We quantified uncertainty arising from the input data and the interpolation by mapping weather station density, elevation bias in the weather stations, and elevation variation within grid cells and through data partitioning and cross validation. Elevation bias tended to be negative (stations lower than expected) at high latitudes but positive in the tropics. Uncertainty is highest in mountainous and in poorly sampled areas. Data partitioning showed high uncertainty of the surfaces on isolated islands, e.g. in the Pacific. Aggregating the elevation and climate data to 10 arc min resolution showed an enormous variation within grid cells, illustrating the value of high-resolution surfaces. A comparison with an existing data set at 10 arc min resolution showed overall agreement, but with significant variation in some regions. A comparison with two high-resolution data sets for the United States also identified areas with large local differences, particularly in mountainous areas. Compared to previous global climatologies, ours has the following advantages: the data are at a higher spatial resolution (400 times greater or more); more weather station records were used; improved elevation data were used; and more information about spatial patterns of uncertainty in the data is available. Owing to the overall low density of available climate stations, our surfaces do not capture of all variation that may occur at a resolution of 1 km, particularly of precipitation in mountainous areas. In future work, such variation might be captured through knowledgebased methods and inclusion of additional co-variates, particularly layers obtained through remote sensing. Copyright  2005 Royal Meteorological Society.

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Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas.

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~schapire/papers/ecolmod.pdf

Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions

[1] We present the Met Office Hadley Centre's sea ice and sea surface temperature (SST) data set, HadISST1, and the nighttime marine air temperature (NMAT) data set, HadMAT1. HadISST1 replaces the global sea ice and sea surface temperature (GISST) data sets and is a unique combination of monthly globally complete fields of SST and sea ice concentration on a 1° latitude-longitude grid from 1871. The companion HadMAT1 runs monthly from 1856 on a 5° latitude-longitude grid and incorporates new corrections for the effect on NMAT of increasing deck (and hence measurement) heights. HadISST1 and HadMAT1 temperatures are reconstructed using a two-stage reduced-space optimal interpolation procedure, followed by superposition of quality-improved gridded observations onto the reconstructions to restore local detail. The sea ice fields are made more homogeneous by compensating satellite microwave-based sea ice concentrations for the impact of surface melt effects on retrievals in the Arctic and for algorithm deficiencies in the Antarctic and by making the historical in situ concentrations consistent with the satellite data. SSTs near sea ice are estimated using statistical relationships between SST and sea ice concentration. HadISST1 compares well with other published analyses, capturing trends in global, hemispheric, and regional SST well, containing SST fields with more uniform variance through time and better month-to-month persistence than those in GISST. HadMAT1 is more consistent with SST and with collocated land surface air temperatures than previous NMAT data sets.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2002JD002670

Global analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice, and night marine air temperature since the late nineteenth century

Drafting Authors: Neil Adger, Pramod Aggarwal, Shardul Agrawala, Joseph Alcamo, Abdelkader Allali, Oleg Anisimov, Nigel Arnell, Michel Boko, Osvaldo Canziani, Timothy Carter, Gino Casassa, Ulisses Confalonieri, Rex Victor Cruz, Edmundo de Alba Alcaraz, William Easterling, Christopher Field, Andreas Fischlin, Blair Fitzharris, Carlos Gay García, Clair Hanson, Hideo Harasawa, Kevin Hennessy, Saleemul Huq, Roger Jones, Lucka Kajfež Bogataj, David Karoly, Richard Klein, Zbigniew Kundzewicz, Murari Lal, Rodel Lasco, Geoff Love, Xianfu Lu, Graciela Magrín, Luis José Mata, Roger McLean, Bettina Menne, Guy Midgley, Nobuo Mimura, Monirul Qader Mirza, José Moreno, Linda Mortsch, Isabelle Niang-Diop, Robert Nicholls, Béla Nováky, Leonard Nurse, Anthony Nyong, Michael Oppenheimer, Jean Palutikof, Martin Parry, Anand Patwardhan, Patricia Romero Lankao, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Stephen Schneider, Serguei Semenov, Joel Smith, John Stone, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, David Vaughan, Coleen Vogel, Thomas Wilbanks, Poh Poh Wong, Shaohong Wu, Gary Yohe

Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

150 years ago this month, on Wednesday, 18th May 1859, after a full day’s work in the basement laboratory at the Royal Institution in central London, the 38-year-old Irish scientist John Tyndall wrote in his journal: Experimented all day; the subject is completely in my hands! Tyndall had been experimenting with the absorptive properties of gases and vapours with a view to testing the idea that different gases, commonly found in the Earth’s atmosphere, absorbed differing amounts of radiant heat (i.e. longwave infrared radiation). This was the idea that the physicist Joseph Fourier had articulated more than 30 years earlier and on which Claude Pouillet had more recently elaborated. But no one had demonstrated experimentally such a phenomenon existed. If true, the idea could help explain how the temperature of this, and other planets, was regulated. Tyndall’s experiments in May 1859, which he further refined for several years afterwards, established for the first time that molecules of gases, such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane, do indeed absorb more energy than oxygen and nitrogen when radiant heat is passed through them. Less than four weeks after declaring success in his journal, on Friday, 10th June, at an evening meeting of the Royal Institution with Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, in the chair, John Tyndall offered the first public, experimentally based account of what has become known as the greenhouse effect. This physical basis for anthropogenic global warming was established six months before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species which laid the biological basis for life’s evolutionary diversity. This short article offers an account of Tyndall’s ground-breaking experiments 150 years ago and remarks on their significance for later discussions about climate change.

On the origin of ‘the greenhouse effect’: John Tyndall's 1859 interrogation of nature

Climate change and the significance of religion

The impacts of climate variability and climate change in the Nile Basin on future water resources in Egypt

The report describes the greenhouse effect, past climate changes, and forecasts. The implications for China, and for policies are discussed. Over China, warming has been greater (nearly 1.0[degree]C since the last century) than over the rest of the planet. It is also more pronounced in winter. Climatic change would have a substantial impact on natural vegetation in China. By 2050, large changes in cropping systems would occur. Sea level rise is likely to affect some densely populated areas. 14 refs., 24 figs., 8 tabs.

Mike Hulme

Papers

On the origin of ‘the greenhouse effect’: John Tyndall's 1859 interrogation of nature

Climate change and the significance of religion

The impacts of climate variability and climate change in the Nile Basin on future water resources in Egypt

Climate change due to the greenhouse effect and its implications for China

Exploring climate change through science and in society