The quality of homogenized data does not only depend on the performance of the homogenization algorithm, but also on the metadata, documentary evidence of possible break points. Therefore, we (benchmarking working group of the international surface temperature initiative) want to include metadata in our benchmark.
The amount and quality of metadata is thus likely important to obtain realistic estimates of the uncertainty in climate variability and trends due to remaining inhomogeneities. For the quantity of metadata we can just mimic the metadata in the ISTI database.
I am wondering whether we have enough information on the quality of the metadata. Especially as it will be difficult to tell whether the meta data was right. That there was no jump in the (monthly mean) data, does not mean that nothing has changed. Do we have any idea about the accuracy of the available (machine-readable) metadata? That the distribution of break sizes at dates with a known break (from metadata) was normally distributed (Menne and Williams, 2005) gives some hope that the quality is good enough.
1 comment:
Victor,
within the US we have at least reasonable metadata availability in machine readable format. As things stand outside of the US the current first release will consist solely of positional information. However, if you or others know of machine readable metadata availability we could investigate bringing this in. Please email data.submission@surfacetemperatures.org if you or others do know of any additional machine readable metadata resources.
Peter
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