63-953 Climate and Satellite Data Analysis

MS Integrated Climate System Sciences

Date: 3.2.2014-7.2.2014

Place: Geom 1536c

Course objectives

The participants will learn to practically work with climate model, reanalysis, in-situ station and satellite data. Organized as a group project, the participants will further learn the principles of project management and shared software development.

Schedule

Monday

General Introduction

• Project management and documentation

• Python

• Access to data sets

• Plotting Seawater plot.ipynb

• Data Visualization: Generating maps

• IPython Notebooks Gallery of interesting IPython Notebooks

• Stochastic analysis of time series.ipynb Monte carlo.ipynb GISSTEMP netcdf.ipynb datetimeobjects.ipynb Station data seasonal cycle.ipynb

Group work: develop a project plan and write a short technical proposal for your project.

Final report due by 15. March 2014

Obtain data and do preliminary analysis (e.g. data coverage).

Tuesday

Morning: Group presentations of project plan and preliminary analysis. Afternoon: implementation and project work

Wednesday

Morning: Group presentations of methods and code implementations Afternoon: Project work

Thursday

Morning: Group presentations of preliminary results Afternoon: Project work

Friday

Morning: final presenation of results and discussion Afternoon: evaluation and preparation of final report

Topics for group work

Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends

Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way fill the gaps of the HadCRUT temperature data set by using satellite data. Compare their new reconstruction of surface temperature data to independent in-situ observations and reanalysis data.

Cowtand and Way (2013) methods and data are freely available:

• http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract

• http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kdc3/papers/coverage2013/methods.html

Surface temperatures are available from the International Arctic Buoy Programme (IABP) website:

• http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/data_satemp.html

Cowtan and Way (CW2013) reconstruction

/ProjectA

• Review methods of Cowtan and Way (2013)
• Write code to read and plot the data
• Calculate trends and variabilites

Variations in Surface Air Temperature Observations in the Arctic

/ProjectB

• Review methods of Rigor et al. (2000)
• Write code to read and plot the gridded buoy data
• Calculate trends and variabilites

Reference:

• Rigor, I., R. Colony, and S. Martin, 2000, Variations in Surface Air Temperature Observations in the Arctic, 1979 - 1997, J. Climate, Vol. 13, no 5, 896-914.

Data intercomparison

(advanced programming skills needed)

• Write code to interpolate the different datasets in a common grid
• Compare CW2013, buoy and reanalysis data (variability and trends)

/ProjectC

Soil moisture

• Sampling bias

/ProjectD

TODOs

Data

• CW2013

• ERA-Interim

• NCEP

• Bouy data

Final report

Template structure:

• Abstract
• Introduction: state of the art (literature), statement of the problem
• Methods and data
• Results
• Discussion
• Conlcusion

References

• Python at KlimaCampus

• Python Scripting for Computational Science, Hans Petter Langtangen, Springer (available in the ZMAW library)