SCIENCE

Meeting in the Netherlands will highlight the value of historic data for understanding the past and projecting future climate

Recovering historical weather data: Meeting in The Netherlands will highlight the value of historic data for understanding the past and projecting future climate

At the ACRE (Atmospheric Circulation Reconstruction over the Earth) annual workshop in The Netherlands, international climate scientists will present a series of talks about how historic weather data—culled from 100-year-old ship logs and the notebooks of historic weather observers—are critical for understanding Earth's future climate as well as its past.

WHAT: 4th Annual Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) Workshop

WHERE: Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute 
De Bilt, The Netherlands

WHEN: Sept. 21-23, 2011 
Sessions begin at 8:30 a.m. daily 
A full agenda is available online

By mathematically stitching together sparse historic observations, climate scientists are creating datasets of information on the state of the atmosphere at various points in time. The work requires weeks of time on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Resulting weather maps – called reanalyses – can be used to address past and future climate variability and change, and to better understand historic events driven by weather or climate patterns.

Gil Compo, from NOAA and its Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (at the University of Colorado at Boulder) is a co-convener of the workshop, with Rob Allan of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the ACRE project manager and Albert Klein Tank of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

Presentations include:

• Rescue of Historical U.S. Marine Data in Support of Marine Ecology (Catherine Marzin, NOAA, US)
• Citizen Science: Old Weather (Philip Brohan, ACRE & Met Office, UK)
• Storminess (Dave Easterling, NOAA, US)
• Recovery of Logbooks And International Marine Data (Clive Wilkinson, University of East Anglia, UK)
• International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (Scott Woodruff, NOAA, US)
• 1894 Thames Flooding Study (Richard Jones, Met Office, UK)
• Hail Propensity in Queensland (Roger Stone, University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
• The HMS Plover High School Project (Kevin Wood, NOAA, US)
• German initiative: Rescue of world-wide historical climate data (Birger Tinz and Gudrun Rosenhagen, Deutscher Wetterdienst, German Weather Service, Germany)
• AAA project: French historical climate and weather observations rescue (Sylvie Jourdain, Météo-France)
• Reconstructing Scotland's weather for the 18th and 19th centuries (Alastair Dawson, University of Aberdeen, UK and Edward Hanna, University of Sheffield, UK)