Research

My research interests are many and varied (see also international activities tab). Here I intend only to cover things that I am currently working upon. I'll do my best to clean things up periodically and obviously for work in progress only superficial details will be given where there are other partners involved or any sensitivities.

Surface temperature changes

I continue to work with colleagues at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information on the development, evaluation and uncertainty quantification of their various surface temperature products. Most latterly a new version 5 of the Sea Surface Temperature product ERSST has been published. An uncertainty analysis is in progress.

I recently was co-lead on a workshop with SAMSI and IMAGe on developing new and novel statistical approaches to surface temperature homogenisation.

Changes in surface humidity

Working with colleagues from the UK Met Office and elsewhere I continue to contribute to the development of surface humidity products and their uncertainty quantification.

Use of reference quality observations

I have an interest in the development and use of reference quality observations to inform climate monitoring in the future. There was an EU project - GAIA-CLIM that aims to use these measurements to better characterise satellite measurements. I was the coordinator for my sins. I have also recently drafted a paper on what would be involved in a surface reference network.

Citizen science

I am interested in how citizen scientists can contribute to the knowledge base by learning through doing. There are many interesting projects out there ranging from running climate models through digitizing naval log books to taking and sharing meteorological observations. I am a moderator at cyclonecenter.org and have been involved in the analysis stage.

I would like to pursue digitization of land records and possibly creating an ensemble of surface temperature datasets through citizen scientist efforts. I remain in pursuit of that elusive pot of gold folks keep talking about to enable this.

Volcanic influences on 21st Century projections

I continue to work with colleagues in Bergen on this issue.