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Centre for Complexity Science

CO907 Group Project Briefing & Data

Schedule autumn 2010:

Week 1, Oct 4-

  • (Mon 2 Computing class)
  • Tues 10 CO907 Group Project Briefing
  • (Tues 3 Computing class)
  • Thurs 3-5 RCB will join a separate coordination & progress meeting of each group for ca 30 mins. You arrange these!!
  • Fri 9.30 joint briefing/class/surgery

Week 2, Oct 11-

  • (Mon 2 Computing class)
  • Tues 10-12 RCB will join a separate progress meeting of each group for ca 30 mins. You arrange these!!
  • (Tues 3 lecture (Chapman))
  • Thurs 10-12 briefing/class/surgery. Matters arising (inc from Chapman lecture Tues) and presentation issues.
  • (Thurs 3 Lecture (Chapman))
  • Fri 1.30 Group Project presentations; allocation of individual projectsSchedule 2010 Jan 4-8

Students are allocated to four teams.

Your team: it is part of the task to work together as a team, coordinating, sharing and dividing tasks, pooling and interpreting results, and reporting jointly. You are in this as a team.

The other teams: the point of several teams is more to keep size manageable than for a contest. However let's try to keep their work independent enough so that it is significant whether results turn out to agree.

All of us: this whole exercise is a work in progress and you must be ready for things not to work as smoothly as we woudl all like.

Data Sources

MetOffice (Hadley Centre) version of world average temperature history is available at http://www.metoffice.com/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcrut3.html . You can drill down for more info from there. In particular make sure to see http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/ and its links and data.

NASA Goddard maintains a competing data programme: see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

The (US) National Oceanogrpahic and Atmospheric Administration has a third data collection: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.html This includes data in bands of latitude. They also host temperature records for different height bands in the atmosphere: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/msu/index.html.

MetOffice released 2010 the temperature records from 1500+ weather stations worldwide. This data can be accessed via: http://www.metoffice.com/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html (see especially the link to all data as a single zip file). There appears to be similar detail available from NASA Goddard.

Even more data: you could look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record and here: http://www.ipcc-data.org/obs/index.html .

Note: most of these sources deal in "temperature anomalies" relative to somewhat arbitrary baseline figures. You are welcome to regard the baseline differences as (time independent) free fitting parameters.

Carbon Dioxide levels have only been directly recorded since 1959. The record can be found via: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ . (Note this page has two data collections, from Mona Loa from 1959 and global from ca 1980.) There is more CO2 data here http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_100_yrs.html with links to longer records (but beware some of the politicallobbying on this site).

Initial Questions

  • How well do at least two of the published global temperature records agree about the time dependence?
  • Can you establish any meaningful (independent estimates of) statistical error on the global temperature values?

Moving On

  • Is there any observed time lag between land and ocean temperatures? Are there an out-of-line features?
  • Is there any observed correlation between carbon dioxide levels and global temperature (or their rates of rise)?
  • Is there any observed correlation between total Greenhouse Gas Index and temperature difference between troposphere and stratosphere (or their rates of rise)?

Open Ended

  • What else can you find in this data?

see Note on Expectations, including detailed assessment criteria. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Someone reported difficulty with some data links on this page - notably NOAA. I have found and fixed some forwarding links which worked under Vista but not under XP (all using IE8 browser). If there are still problems which cannot be worked around, let me know. RCB.