Official URL: https://www.epa.ie/publications/research/climate-c...

Long instrumental records are rarely, if ever, homogeneous and most decade-to-century-scale time series of atmospheric data have been affected by changes caused by climatic and/or non-climatic factors. Nevertheless, accurate climate data are a prerequisite for basing climate-related decision-making on, and quality-controlled homogenised climate data are becoming integral to efforts across many countries to deliver climate services. The aim of homogenisation techniques (i.e. procedures combining detection and correction) is the removal or reduction of any spurious non-climatic signal introducing inhomogeneities to the time series being investigated. Climate change research has also further spurred research and operational work on the homogeneity of climate data based on an increased requirement for good-quality climate data for climate model evaluation In this study we will use both HOMER and ACMANT to make comparisons between the homogenisation results for a medium-sized station network. As far as we are aware, this is a first such application of both methods to a sizeable network of precipitation stations.