Background to the Workshop

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Background to the Workshop

• Thomas C. Peterson
• National Climatic Data Center/NESDIS/NOAA
• Asheville, NC USA
• October 2004

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Regional Climate Change Workshops

• 1999 CCl/CLIVAR Working Group on Climate Change
  Detection meets
• Asked, What could a small group of volunteers do
  to further global climate change detection?
• Internationally coordinate a suite of indices
• Mainly highlighting changes in extremes
• Derived from daily data
• Hold regional climate change workshops
• Modeled after the Asia-Pacific Network Workshops

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2001 Two workshops were held

• In Kingston, Jamaica for the Caribbean
• More on this workshop shortly
• In Casablanca, Morocco for various countries in
  Africa
• Produced a workshop report, but thats it
• No careful post-workshop data/indices analyses
• No peer-reviewed publication of analyses of
  indices that could contribute to IPCC
• No release of indices
• No release of data

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Caribbean Climate Change Workshop

• January 2001
• At the University of the West Indies
• 18 of the 21 met services in the region
  participated
• Support from WMO, the University of the West
  Indies, NOAA and NASA

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Combination of seminars and hands-on data analysis
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30 Stations UsedPrecipitation, Temperature, Both
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Careful post-Workshop Analysis Addressed Data
Problems

• Many stations digital record were too short to
  use in this analysis
• Limited to data from 30 stations
• QC a wide variety of checks, including looking
  for
• Extreme values due to digitizing errors
• Incorrect English/metric units
• Runs of the same value
• Tmax lt Tmin
• Missing precipitation set to 0
• Homogeneity
• Evaluation of time series of the indices to weed
  out the most inhomogeneous
• Problem stations 3 Tmax, 2 Tmin, No
  precipitation

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Accomplishments

• Better understanding of data as comparisons could
  be made across borders
• 17 author J. of Geophysical Research article on
  climate change in the Caribbean
• Released the suite of indices from the data
• Also released the data themselves
• To researchers from one web site at UWI
• Therefore, the work is reproducible

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2002 Frich et al. Climate Research global
indices paper
Note large blank areas in global indices map
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2004

• Now the WMO CCl/CLIVAR Expert Team on Climate
  Change Detection, Monitoring Indices has been
  formed and is coordinating workshops
• Abdalah Mokssit and Serhat Sensoy are members
• Tom Peterson is chair of the ETs CCl OPAG
• Funding support from U.S. State Department,
  START, WCRP and IAI

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Workshops

• Southern Africa May 31-June 4, 2004
• Bruce Hewiston, Univ. of Cape Town
• Southern South America, August 9-14, 2004
• Maceio, Brazil
• Luiz Molion, David Karoly, Tom Peterson
• All countries in the region participated
• No country could release data
• All countries released indices as well as all QC
  and homogeneity assessments
• Two articles planned temperature and
  precipitation

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Workshops, Cont

• Southwest Asia October 4-9, 2004
• WMO meteorological training center in Alanya
  Turkey
• Serhat Sensoy, Tom Peterson and Valery
  Detemmerman
• Central America and northern South America Nov.
  8-12, 2004
• Patricia Ramirez, Enric Aguilar, Manola Brunet
• Central and Southern Asia workshop in Pune, India
• February 2005

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Workshop Software

• Indices formulations coordinated by the Expert
  Team on Climate Change Detection, Monitoring and
  Indices
• Workshop results will be able to fit together
  seamlessly
• Workshop suitable software (RClimDex) produced on
  behalf of the ET by Xuebin Zhang of Environment
  Canada
• http//cccma.seos.uvic.ca/ETCCDMI/
• Uses the free R statistical package

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Putting It All Together

• Lisa Alexander (Hadley Centre) is coordinating a
  global indices analyses article (for ETCCDMI)
• All available daily data
• Indices from workshops
• In time to contribute to IPCC
• E.g., to be submitted by January or February
• Long list of co-authors

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