Improved Understanding of Past Climatic Variability from Early Daily European Instrumental Sources

388 Pages·2002·12.302 MB·English

by  Dario Camuffo, Phil Jones (auth.), Dario Camuffo, Phil Jones (eds.)

IMPROVED UNDERSTANDING OF PAST CLIMATIC VARIABILITY
FROM EARLY DAILY EUROPEAN INSTRUMENTAL SOURCES
Cover illustration: "Calibration of thermometer (steam point) in a Physics laboratory, mid XVIII
century. A Florentine, an Amontons, a Drebbel and other thermometers are hung on the wall (after:
Jean Antoine Nollet (1748): Let;ons de Physique Experimentale, Tome quatrieme, Paris: chez les
Freres Guerin, courtesy of the Mus eo di Storia della Scienza, Florence)."
IMPROVED UNDERSTANDING OF PAST
CLIMATIC VARIABILITY FROM EARLY DAILY
EUROPEAN INSTRUMENTAL SOURCES
Edited by
Dario Camuffo and Phil Jones
National Research Council, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate,
Padova, Italy
Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
Reprinted from Climatic Change
Volume 53, Nos. 1~3, 2002
....
''
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
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ISBN 978-94-010-3908-6 ISBN 978-94-010-0371-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-01 0-0371-1
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Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002
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Contents
D. CAMUFFO and P. D. JONES I Improved Understanding of Past
Climatic Variability from Early Daily European Instrumental Sources
Guest Editorial
I History and Correction of Long Temperature Series
D. CAMUFFO I History of the Long Series of Daily Air Temperature in
Padova (1725~ 1998) 7
C. COCHEO and D. CAMUFFO Corrections of Systematic Errors
and Data Homogenisation in the Daily Temperature Padova Series
(1725~ 1998) 77
M. MAUGERI, L. BUFFONI and F. CHLISTOVSKY I Daily Milan Tem
perature and Pressure Series (1763~1998): History of the Observations
and Data and Metadata Recovery 101
M. MAUGERI, L. BUFFONI, B. DELMONTE and A. FASSINA I Daily
Milan Temperature and Pressure Series (1763~1998): Completing and
Homogenising the Data 119
M. BARRIENDOS, J. MARTIN-VIDE, J. C. PENA and R. RODRIGUEZ I
Daily Meteorological Observations in Cadiz ~ San Fernando. Analysis
of the Documentary Sources and the Instrumental Data Content ( 1786~
1996) 151
A. MOBERG, H. BERGSTROM, J. RUIZ KRIGSMAN and 0. SVANERED I
Daily Air Temperature and Pressure Series for Stockholm ( 17 56~ 1998) 171
H. BERGSTROM and A. MOBERG I Daily Air Temperature and Pressure
Series for Uppsala (1722~1998) 213
P. D. JONES and D. H. LISTER I The Daily Temperature Record for
St. Petersburg (1743~1996) 253
G. R. DEMAREE, P.-J. LACHAERT, T. VERHOEVE and E. THOEN I
The Long-Term Daily Central Belgium Temperature (CBT) Series
(1767~ 1998) and Early Instrumental Meteorological Observations in
Belgium 269
II Typical Problems with Early Thermometers and Measuring Times
D. CAMUFFO I Calibration and Instrumental Errors in Early Measurements
of Air Temperature 297
D. CAMUFFO I Errors in Early Temperature Series Arising from Changes in
Style of Measuring Time, Sampling Schedule and Number of Observations 331
III Trends in Extreme Temperatures
Z. YAN, P. D. JONES, T. D. DAVIES, A. MOBERG, H. BERGSTROM,
D. CAMUFFO, C. COCHEO, M. MAUGERI, G. R. DEMAREE,
T. VERHOEVE, E. THOEN, M. BARRIENDOS, R. RODRIGUEZ,
J. MARTIN-VIDE and C. YANG I Trends of Extreme Temperatures in
Europe and China Based on Daily Observations 355
IMPROVED UNDERSTANDING OF PAST CLIMATIC VARIABILITY
FROM EARLY DAILY EUROPEAN INSTRUMENTAL SOURCES
Guest Editorial
Climatic Change is a journal dedicated to the problem of climatic variability and
change in its entirety - its descriptions, causes, implications and interactions.
For this reason it welcomes contributions of a multidisciplinary nature, based on
extensive research projects which advance our knowledge in a variety of fields. Fol
lowing Volume 43, No.1, 1999 Climatic Variability in Sixteenth-Century Europe
and its Social Dimension, another special issue is published. This time it is ded
icated to a related research programme that has involved historical, instrumental,
astronomical, statistical and climatic studies with the aim of clarifying key prob
lems that are of concern to the scientific community, policy makers, and citizens.
oc
We are presently witnessing a global temperature rise of 0.6 over the twentieth
century (Jones et al., 1999). Many frequently asked questions are:
• Is this warming part of a natural climate change, in part a recovery from cooler
conditions in some recent centuries? Is the warming part of a cycle that will
begin to reverse soon?
• Has the natural warming already come to an end and is the present temperature
rise only an effect of anthropogenically-induced changes to the composition
of the atmosphere? Will warming rates continue or even enhance in the future?
• Are we witnessing the combined effect of both natural and uncontrolled
anthropogenic changes? What are the relative weights of the two contribu
tions?
These and many related questions have been extensively addressed in the latest
IPCC report (Houghton et al., 2001). Models seem to confirm the last hypothesis
of a combined effect of natural variability and increases in greenhouse gas concen
trations, but much work is still needed to clarify mechanisms and to determine,
if possible, future changes on decadal timescales. To achieve this we not only
need estimations of future anthropogenic emissions, but also of natural factors that
influence the climate system. Long-term instrumental data are vital to place recent
changes in as long an historical perspective as possible, and to provide series to
develop and validate climate models at the time and space scale we might use for
planning.
Know ledge of the past is one of the keys to interpreting the present and forecast
*ing th e future. The answer is conditioned by the quality of our present information,
and this gives rise to three further questions:
Climatic Change 53: 1--4, 2002.
2 GUEST EDITORIAL
• Is our knowledge based on the best available data?
• Can we learn more from the past by utilising new, unexploited data?
• Are we really utilising the best strategies to interpret available data?
This was the rationale by which the EU research project Improved understanding
of past climatic variability from early daily European instrumental sources (IM
PROVE) developed with the funding of the European Commission, DG XII. The
study involved European regions from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from
the Atlantic to Eastern Europe.
IMPROVE's general objectives were to:
• assess correction and homogenisation protocols for early daily instrumental
records of air temperature and air pressure;
• produce general comments on the case studies to be used as guidelines
for the quality-assessment, correction and homogenisation of other early
instrumental records of air temperature and pressure;
• recover data; produce daily pressure and temperature series for carefully
selected examples from European archives, i.e., Padova (Italy, 1725-1998),
Milan (Italy, 1763-1998), Central Belgium (1767-1998, temperature only),
Uppsala (Sweden, 1722-1998), Stockholm (Sweden, 1756-1998), San Fer
nando/Cadiz (Spain, 1776-1996) and St. Petersburg (Russia, 1743-1996,
temperature only). These series have been augmented with recently-produced
daily temperature series (Central England, U.K., 1772-1999);
• publish the history of each series, all the original data and metadata, and the
final corrected, validated and homogenised series on CD-ROM, along with
a detailed explanation of all the steps that were necessary to arrive from the
original registers to the final series. The special issue of Climatic Change
contains the papers concerning all the above items, except the CD-ROM with
the original and the corrected data. The CD-ROM is enclosed in a book, a
hardbound version of this issue;
• characterise climate variability and determine teleconnection behaviour across
Europe, with particular reference to high-frequency temperature variabil
ity, seasonal temperature extremes, recurrence intervals and growing season
lengths.
The series on the CD-ROM can be considered as an Appendix to the papers in
this volume explaining in more detail the history of the series and the types of
corrections made. Users of the data, therefore, should refer to the appropriate pa
pers in the volume when including analyses of the series in any subsequent papers.
Also, each series is different from each other. We have attempted to standardize
the formats as much as possible, but the different numbers of observations per day
mean that all are different. Readers with particular questions about any one of the
series should contact the author( s) of the relevant paper( s) rather than the editors of
the volume and CD-ROM. The editors will be happy to deal with general enquiries
GUEST EDITORIAL 3
about the whole IMPROVE project and techniques used to analyse the series as a
group.
As far as the above fundamental questions are concerned, IMPROVE has
contributed in a number of ways by:
1. Producing seven new highly reliable series, extending over nearly three cen
turies. Another important aspect is the high (daily) resolution of the series,
which allows more insight into past variability, particularly extremes. Monthly
averages can smooth out and mask many important climatic features.
2. Analysing and correcting errors and inhomogeneities in the long series.
Metadata have been considered as important as data, since metadata are fun
damental not only to correct, make homogeneous and interpret data, but also
to distinguish apparent climatic changes, due to variations in observational
methodology, from real climatic changes. This not only helped to produce
more accurate series, but also clarified the question of the quality of the
existing ones. All long series are affected by a huge number of problems.
Measurement errors are mainly randomly distributed and they disappear when
the averages of many series are calculated. The real problem is the presence of
systematic errors that vary over the course of time, the changes in measuring
style due to national or international observational practices or the simple evo
lution of technology that have affected the observations in the same way. With
extensive historical research of all the metadata, most of the problems can be
overcome but some may remain because some changes made in the past were
not considered important enough to document. Some illustrative case studies
reported in this issue will be applicable to all European locations and possibly
elsewhere. Some are probably unique to the location and the period considered
but they highlight the type of issues that need to be considered.
At present, much attention in the climate sciences is devoted to developing
future scenarios. To this aim, the quality of data is essential and a number
of subjective and relatively objective criteria exist for testing monthly data
and sources of inhomogeneity. However, the evaluation of the data quality, as
deduced from the statistical analysis of the data, appears more optimistic than
the error deduced by looking at the instruments capability and field practices.
Corrections based on metadata describing observational errors and biases re
quires exhaustive studies to improve the quality oflong series. One of the aims
of IMPROVE is to encourage critical revision and improvement of of existing
series, while providing, at the same time, examples of typical errors that need
to be removed and identifying the procedures to achieve this.
3. Warming average over the 20th century is about 0.6 °C, but is highly spatially
variable. At first glance it might seem that such a rise would be impossible to
measure, but the consistent spatial patterns incorporating observations from
different countries and from oceanic regions attest to its veracity. To policy
maker and the public the issue of climatic change is often perceived through
4 GUEST EDITORIAL
extreme events. Analyses of the distribution of extreme events, undertaken
using the results from IMPROVE, has shown that recent warming is charac
terised, for most of the study sites, more by a decrease in frequency of the
coldest days, than by increases in frequency of the warmest.
References
Houghton, J. T., Ding, Y., Griggs, D. J., Noguer, M., van der Linden, P. J., Dai, X., Maskell, K., and
Johnson, C. A.: 2001, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, IPCC, Cambridge University
Press, p. 881.
Jones, P. D., New, M., Parker, D. E., Martin, S., and Rigor, I. G.: 1999, 'Surface Air Temperature and
its Changes over the Past 150 Years', Reviews of Geophysics 37, 173-199.
IMPROVE Co-ordinator; DARIO CAMUFFO
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche,
Istituto di Scienze dell'Atmosfera e del Clima,
I-35127 Padova,
Italy
University of East Anglia, PHIL JONES
Climatic Research Unit,
NR4 7TJ Norwich,
U.K.
I
HISTORY AND CORRECTION
OF LONG TEMPERATURE SERIES