UKMO-virtual-climate-2021-poster_v6_A3.pdf (3.39 MB)
Growing the African land surface air temperature record: by assimilation of short-segment time series
poster
posted on 2022-12-28, 10:46 authored by Michael TaylorMichael Taylor, Timothy J Osborn, Philip D Jones, David Lister, Emily Wallis, Ian Harris● Africa is a climate-sensitive continent impacted by anthropogenic global warming. Its instrumental record helps provide important spatial coverage for NWP validation and the monitoring of climate change.
● However, CLIMAT reports of surface temperature observations from Africa suggest only ~50% of those expected are being incorporated in some global temperature databases. One main reason is short-segments that do not span the 1961-1990 baseline needed to calculate anomaly time series.
● To allow for the immediate incorporation of short-segment data we develop a method that refers to historic trends in 20th Century Reanalysis (20CRv3) to estimate the baseline.
● We evaluate the impact of inclusion of the ‘missing’ stations on the continent’s temperature anomaly record.
● However, CLIMAT reports of surface temperature observations from Africa suggest only ~50% of those expected are being incorporated in some global temperature databases. One main reason is short-segments that do not span the 1961-1990 baseline needed to calculate anomaly time series.
● To allow for the immediate incorporation of short-segment data we develop a method that refers to historic trends in 20th Century Reanalysis (20CRv3) to estimate the baseline.
● We evaluate the impact of inclusion of the ‘missing’ stations on the continent’s temperature anomaly record.
