Towards a global land surface climate fiducial reference measurements network

P W Thorne,B Goodison,H J Diamond,C Tassone,V Venema,T C Peterson,J H Lawrimore,T Oakley,N B Ingleby,Z Hausfather,A Merlone,S Harrigan,P D Jones,D H Lister,K M Willett,M Palecki,M De Podesta

doi:10.1002/joc.5458

Abstract

There is overwhelming evidence that the climate system has warmed since the instigation of instrumental meteorological observations. The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the evidence for warming was unequivocal. However, owing to imperfect measurements and ubiquitous changes in measurement networks and techniques, there remain uncertainties in many of the details of these historical changes. These uncertainties do not call into question the trend or overall magnitude of the changes in the global climate system. Rather, they act to make the picture less clear than it could be, particularly at the local scale where many decisions regarding adaptation choices will be required, both now and in the future. A set of high‐quality long‐term fiducial reference measurements of essential climate variables will enable future generations to make rigorous assessments of future climate change and variability, providing society with the best possible information to support future decisions. Here we propose that by implementing and maintaining a suitably stable and metrologically well‐characterized global land surface climate fiducial reference measurements network, the present‐day scientific community can bequeath to future generations a better set of observations. This will aid future adaptation decisions and help us to monitor and quantify the effectiveness of internationally agreed mitigation steps. This article provides the background, rationale, metrological principles, and practical considerations regarding what would be involved in such a network, and outlines the benefits which may accrue. The challenge, of course, is how to convert such a vision to a long‐term sustainable capability providing the necessary well‐characterized measurement series to the benefit of global science and future generations.

Highlights

A suite of meteorological parameters has been measured using meteorological instrumentation for more than a century (e.g., Menne et al, 2012; Becker et al, 2013; Willett et al, 2013; Rennie et al, 2014; Jones, 2016, termed “historical observations”). Numerous analyses of these historical observations underpin much of our understanding of recent climatic changes and their causes (Hartmann et al, 2013)
Station locations, observation times, instrumentation, and land use characteristics have changed at many stations. These changes affect the representativeness of individual station series, and their long-term stability (Karl et al, 1986; Quayle et al, 1991; Changnon and Kunkel, 2006; Hausfather et al, 2013)
Having set out the current status of data sets derived from ad hoc historical networks, in the remainder of this article, we propose the construction of a different kind of measurement network: a reference network whose primary mission is the establishment of a suite of long-term, stable, metrologically traceable, measurements for climate science

Summary

Introduction

The surface fiducial reference measurements network would provide the temporally stable high-quality backbone of the global climate observing system. This will include substantive periods of overlapping observations to quantify the uncertainty in the change and ensure long-term time series comparability across all scales, from the individual measurement to multi-decadal trend, and a program of continual evaluation and comparison of new and evolving technologies (in conjunction with other relevant bodies) as is performed with the USCRN program.

Results

Conclusion