Thursday, May 16, 2013

Meeting announcement: Characterising surface temperatures in data-sparse and extreme regions (with a focus on high-latitude domains)

2nd Annual EarthTemp Network Meeting 
12-14 June 2013, Copenhagen 

Data-sparse and extreme regions is the topic of the second year of the network. A focus will be the high-latitude domains, but the network remains inclusive and open to surface temperature researchers of all backgrounds who are interested in sharing knowledge and making connections across sub-discipline boundaries. 

The workshop aims to facilitate collaborations between researchers and will have substantial dialogue and networking activities as well as invited overview presentations, panel discussions and the opportunity to present your work in poster sessions. Sessions planned for the programme are: 

Overview presentations by invited speakers, followed by panel discussions on 
- High-latitude surface temperatures: synthesis of datasets and what they tell us (Kevin Wood) 
- Arctic Land Surface Temperature: Variability and Change (Claude Duguay) 
- Sea Surface Temperature Changes in Polar Regions (Pierre Le Borgne) 
- Sea-Ice Surface Temperature Measurements: Status and Utility (Jacob Hoyer) 
Plenary discussion: Combined interpretation of Arctic temperatures Networking activities 

Breakout discussion groups on 
- Techniques for matching measurements and retrievals across different platforms 
- Measurement of high-latitude Surface Temperature (SST): Why is it difficult, and how can we do it better? 
- Satellite Land Surface Temperatures (LST) in high latitudes and high altitudes: How can we exploit them better? 
- The EarthTemp White Paper: Turning recommendations into actions 

Poster sessions & Poster discussions 

There is no attendance fee. 

The workshop is limited to 50 participants. 

Monday, May 13, 2013

Call for regional inhomogeneity info

To create realistic benchmarks we would like to reproduce times and locations of known sources of inhomogeneity as best we can. Please can you help us. If you know of any regional/countrywide changes to the observing system over time please can you list them here or point us to some documentation/reference. Any information is valuable - even if its quite vague.

Ideally we'd like to know:

WHEN - specific date or month or year or even decade etc.
WHERE - a region, a country, an international GTS/WMO change etc.
WHAT - a change in shelter, thermometer type, automation, observing time/practice etc.
HOW - are there any estimates of the size/direction/nature of the effect of this change?

Please post here and encourage others to do so. We then hope to reward you with some realistic error-worlds to play with.

Kate (and the Benchmarking working group)