Monday, February 25, 2013

Four weeks of climate data:
Antarctica Region #1


Welcome to Antarctica. Population: You and the pilot who brought you.

As we will see, most of Antarctica is not being studied and getting reliable data over our time period of 1955 to 2010, two years that had strong La Nñia currents, is going to be problematic.


In every region we will look at, the program I've written cuts it up into a 10 × 10 grid. In this time period, we get only two grid points giving us data.

In the Arctic, even a sparsely covered region like Greenland gave us nine grid points. When we get to the Northern Temperate Zone, coverage will be close to universal everywhere on dry land.


There were no consistent station giving information from 1955 to 1959, so our era starts in 1960. We start in Summer because January is the first full Summer month south of the equator.  This data actually shows a cooling trend.


The Fall trend looks a bit more like warming.


Winter again shows a modest warming trend.


Spring on the other hand looks like it's static or slightly cooling.

If our null hypothesis is there is no significant change, this data does not let us say with any confidence this region is either warming or cooling.

It would be nice if we had more data, but we aren't allowed to make it up.  This kind of sparse coverage and unconvincing data are going to be par for the course on the coldest continent.

This evening, Region #2.

No comments:

Post a Comment