Identifying Climate Change
Over the US, the best record we have for tracking climate change is the United States
Historical Climatology
Network comprised of 1, 221 high-quality stations from the U.S. Cooperative Observing
Network within the 48 contiguous United States. This
USHCN web site also
gives information on quality control and adjustment procedures for reducing biases in the datasets.
A wealth of additional climate data can be found online at the
NCDC . NCDC has prepared
answers to a number of very timely questions:
The global equivalent of the USHCN is the Global Historical Climate Network. To get information
from this source you must agree to a data-use policy of NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization.
This is an example of the current political debate of fair use of global environmental data. After
agreeing to the fair-use policy
you will gain access to the Global Historical Climate Network. The
precipitation
network shows dense coverage over most developed countries. Regions of sparse measurements include
northern Canada, Siberia, central Australia, Sahara Desert, Greenland and Antarctica. The network of daily mean
temperatures is quite similar to the precipitation network, but the distribution of stations
measuring both daily
maximum and daily minimum temperatures is considerably more sparse. Note particularly the lack of
maximum and minimum temperatures over South America.
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