What can we (not?!) say about historical temperature changes from Radiosonde records?
Peter Thorne, UK Met Office, Exeter, United Kingdom; and M. McCarthy and H. Titchner Several independent efforts have been undertaken to create “climate quality” datasets of upper-air temperature changes from both radiosondes and satellites. Although these yield excellent agreement on short timescales they exhibit divergent long-term behaviour. It is this longer term behaviour that is key to policy makers. At present we are restricted to making Animal Farm-esque “all datasets are equally likely” statements or resorting to at best semi-quantitative arguments to disregard certain solutions. The problem is most critical within the tropics where choice of dataset fundamentally alters the perception as to whether climate models are consistent with the observations. This talk will summarise recent work using an automated system of climate dataset construction for radiosondes. Instead of taking three years to create a dataset (and sending the investigator(s) half crazy) we can now create a da
