ICHM Members in the News
Circulation Reconstruction Project Seeks Help from ICHM Members
ICHM member Dr Rob Allan of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change has recently obtained funding for an exciting international three-year project called ACRE (Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth).
ACRE will support the data requirements of pioneering historical climate quality reanalysis projects using only surface observations over the globe. The initial focus will be to support the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project (http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2007/s2771.htm) based in the US, which will produce a global reanalysis product of weather conditions every six hours from the surface to the tropopause at 2 x 2 degree global resolution through the assimilation of only daily to sub-daily surface climate variables (e.g. mean sea-level pressure, sea-surface temperature and sea-ice) from 1892 to the present. This will provide the basis for further extensions of reanalyses of surface observations back in time. There is currently sufficient surface observational data coverage for global reanalyses back to the mid-nineteenth century; and there is sufficient over the North Atlantic - European region from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.
The ACRE project will soon benefit from UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) funding for historical marine data imaging and digitisation over the next 2 years. Monies of the order of £200,000 have been made available this financial year (until the beginning of April in the UK) to image and have digitised (via the Climate Data Modernisation Program [CDMP] in the US) the ship log books of the British East India Company (EIC) held in the British Library. Some 2,000 EIC ship log books cover the period around the 1780s to 1830s, with about 900 log books containing instrumental observations. The EIC logs have data for the North and South Atlantic oceans, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. In addition, a small amount of monies will be used to complete the digitisation of Antarctic expedition supply ship log books for the first 20-30 years of the 20th Century. Over the 2008 financial year, another £200,000 from DEFRA will be used to image ship log books for an extended World War 1 (WW1) period over the globe (1914-1923). It is estimated that there are over 7,000 WW1 ship log books held in the National Archives of the UK. The 2008 funding will only be enough to get the WW1 log books imaged, and additional funds will be sought to have them digitised.
Dr Allan wonders whether the following areas might be of interest to ICHM members and could form the basis for ICHM aid to ACRE and its historical reanalyses objectives:
- Identification and recovery of old weather observations from international repositories (e.g. libraries and archives), societies, etc. and in private hands. ACRE would be most interested in historical atmospheric pressure records on daily to sub-daily time scales.
- Linking/working directly with the ACRE initiative to help with the recovery and interpretation of old terrestrial and marine weather observations. ACRE would be looking to the experience of ICHM members who may themselves work, or have worked, on such data in their professional capacities.
Climate scientists are nowadays very keen to get their hands on historical data. There was a time when some, if not many, meteorologists scorned climatologists as weather stamp collectors, but climate scientists now cannot get enough data from the distant past. They have voracious appetites for weather diaries, ships' logs, etc, etc., and this is where ICHM members may be able to help. Weather diaries are still turning up in libraries, archives, private houses, etc., and some ICHM members may be willing to help find old data and help interpret it for the ACRE initiative.
If you would like to help in any way, please contact Dr Rob Allan, ACRE Project Manager, Hadley Centre for Climate Change, Met Office, FitzRoy Road, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK (rob.allan@metoffice.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)1392 886904). The ACRE project WWW site can be found at: http://brohan.org/hadobs/acre/acre.html.
THE ACRE PROJECT:
Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth
http://brohan.org/hadobs/acre/acre.html