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Alexander Earthtemp Edinburgh 2012 Poster PDF

The CLIMDEX project aims to create improved global gridded datasets of temperature and precipitation extremes for analyzing climate change. It represents a collaboration to advance past datasets by providing longer-term and near-real time data accessible through a web interface, along with uncertainty estimates. Key datasets include gridded extremes indices derived from quality controlled station data sources like GHCN-Daily and regional workshops over the periods 1951-2003 and 1950-2009.

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32 views1 page

Alexander Earthtemp Edinburgh 2012 Poster PDF

The CLIMDEX project aims to create improved global gridded datasets of temperature and precipitation extremes for analyzing climate change. It represents a collaboration to advance past datasets by providing longer-term and near-real time data accessible through a web interface, along with uncertainty estimates. Key datasets include gridded extremes indices derived from quality controlled station data sources like GHCN-Daily and regional workshops over the periods 1951-2003 and 1950-2009.

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Anonymous TWzli5
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The CLIMDEX project: Creation of long-term global gridded products for the analysis

of temperature and precipitation extremes.


Lisa Alexander1,2, Markus Donat1, Yoichi Takayama1 and Hongang Yang1
1. Background

2. Issues and uncertainties

The CCl/CLIVAR/JCOMM Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices


(ETCCDI) has developed a suite of indices derived from daily temperature and
precipitation data with a primary focus on extreme events (Table 1). These
indices have been calculated at station locations using quality controlled data
from international daily datasets e.g. daily Global Historical Climatology
Network (GHCN-Daily) and the European Climate Assessment (ECA&D), with
data sparse regions of the globe supplemented with data from targeted
regional workshops. To account for the uneven global distribution of stations
and in order to easily compare with climate model output, these indices were
gridded onto a 3.75 longitude x 2.5 latitude grid to create the dataset HadEX
(Alexander et al., 2006).

While HadEX made significant advances to our understanding of global changes


in temperature and precipitation extremes (see Fig. 1) and allowed evaluation of
modelled extremes for the first time using state-of-the-art global climate models,
it still suffers from a lack of coverage over large areas (particularly for
precipitation extremes), only covers the period 1951-2003 and does not contain
the measures of uncertainty required to fully assess the trends and variability in
extremes.

ID
TXx
TNx
TXn
TNn
TN10p
TX10p
TN90p
TX90p
DTR

GSL
FD0
SU25
TR20
WSDI
CSDI
RX1day
RX5day
SDII
R10
R20
CDD
CWD

Indicator name
Max Tmax
Max Tmin
Min Tmax
Min Tmin

Indicator definitions
Monthly maximum value of daily max temperature
Monthly maximum value of daily min temperature
Monthly minimum value of daily max temperature
Monthly minimum value of daily min temperature
Percentage of time when daily min temperature < 10th
Cool nights
percentile
Percentage of time when daily max temperature < 10th
Cool days
percentile
Percentage of time when daily min temperature > 90th
Warm nights
percentile
Percentage of time when daily max temperature > 90th
Warm days
percentile
Monthly mean difference between daily max and min
Diurnal temperature range
temperature
Annual (1st Jan to 31st Dec in NH, 1st July to 30th June in
SH) count between first span of at least 6 days with
Growing season length
TG>5C and first span after July 1 (January 1 in SH) of 6
days with TG<5C
Frost days
Annual count when daily minimum temperature < 0C
Summer days
Annual count when daily max temperature > 25C
Tropical nights
Annual count when daily min temperature > 20C
Warm spell duration
Annual count when at least 6 consecutive days of max
indicator
temperature > 90th percentile
Cold spell duration
Annual count when at least 6 consecutive days of min
indicator
temperature < 10th percentile
Max 1-day precipitation
Monthly maximum 1-day precipitation
amount
Max 5-day precipitation
Monthly maximum consecutive 5-day precipitation
amount
The ratio of annual total precipitation to the number of
Simple daily intensity index
wet days ( 1 mm)
Number of heavy
Annual count when precipitation 10 mm
precipitation days
Number of very heavy
Annual count when precipitation 20 mm
precipitation days
Maximum number of consecutive days when
Consecutive dry days
precipitation < 1 mm
Maximum number of consecutive days when
Consecutive wet days
precipitation 1 mm
95th

UNITS
C
C
C
C
%
%
%
%
C

days
days
days
days
days
mm
mm
mm/day

The next generation of global gridded extremes products (the CLIMDEX


project) represents a collaboration between the University of New South Wales,
the University of Melbourne, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and
Environment Canada and is funded by the Australian Research Council and the
Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. Other research institutes
such as the Hadley Centre are also contributing to the project. The project aims
to improve our understanding of the variability of extremes, enhance detection
and attribution studies and provide the highest quality observations for model
evaluation. Advances over previous datasets include longer-term data
availability, delivery via a web interface including near-real time updates, and an
assessment of the uncertainty in the gridded products (see Donat et al., 2011).

days

4. Project data sets

days
days

Dataset

Data Source

Time period

days

Very wet days

Annual total precipitation from days >

percentile

mm

R99p

Extremely wet days

Annual total precipitation from days > 99th percentile

mm

PRCPTOT

Annual total wet-day


precipitation

Annual total precipitation from days 1 mm

mm

Table 1: The extreme temperature and precipitation indices recommended by the ETCCDI (some
user defined indices are not shown). Precise definitions are given at
http://cccma.seos.uvic.ca/ETCCDI/list_27_indices.html.

5. Data access
Data sets will be available through a web
interface www.climdex.org
References
Alexander LV et al. (2006), Global observed changes in daily
climate extremes of temperature and precipitation, J.
Geophys. Res., 111, D05109, doi:10.1029/2005JD006290.
Caesar J, L Alexander and R Vose (2006), Large-scale changes in
observed daily maximum and minimum temperatures:
Creation and analysis of a new gridded data set, J. Geophys.
Res., 111, D05101, doi:10.1029/2005JD006280.
Donat MG. et al. (2011), Uncertainties related to the production
of gridded global data sets of observed climate extreme
indices, WCRP Open Science Conference, Denver, USA

Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia


2ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia
[email protected]

3. The CLIMDEX Project

days

R95p

1Climate

Fig. 1: Trends (days/decade, shown as maps) and annual time series anomalies relative to
19611990 mean values (shown as plots) for annual series between 1951 and 2003 for (a) R10 and
(b) R95pT (i.e. (R95p/PRCPTOT)*100 - see Table 1) from HadEX dataset (Alexander et al., 2006)

HadEX

Quality controlled data from


individual researchers, ETCCDI
and other regional workshops,
GHCN-Daily (mostly over USA
and Brazil); Alexander et al.,
2006 (see Fig. 2a)

1951-2003

HadEX2

As HadEX but with additional


TBA
and more recently updated data

HadGHCNDEX Quality controlled GHCN-Daily


data with long records (see Fig.
2b); Donat et al., 2011 update
of Caesar et al., 2006

1950-2009

GHCNDEX

All GHCN-Daily data with 40+


years of record (see Fig. 2c);
Donat et al. 2011

1951-present
(updated
monthly)

STATDEX

All available station data used in As long as


the above datasets
available station
record

Table 2: Information on datasets that will be included


in the CLIMDEX project. All datasets calculate indices
from station data before gridding except HadGHCNDEX
in which daily station data are gridded first before
indices are calculated. This adds additional uncertainty
estimates to global timeseries (see Fig. 2d).

Fig. 2: (a)-(c) Annual trends in TN90p using


different datasets for the periods indicated
and (d) global average timeseries plots for
each of the three datasets with associated
11-year running means.

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