Sherwood, Steve C. and Titchner, Holly A. and Thorne, Peter and McCarthy, Mark P. (2009) Short Communication How do we tell which estimates of past climate change are correct? International Journal of Climatology, 29 (10). pp. 1520-1523. ISSN 1097-0088

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Abstract

Estimates of past climate change often involve teasing small signals from imperfect instrumental or proxy records. Success is often evaluated on the basis of the spatial or temporal consistency of the resulting reconstruction, or on the apparent prediction error on small space and time scales. However, inherent methodological trade-offs illustrated here can cause climate signal accuracy to be unrelated, or even inversely related, to such performance measures. This is a form of the classic conflict in statistics between minimum variance and unbiased estimators. Comprehensive statistical simulations based on climate model output are probably the best way to reliably assess whether methods of reconstructing climate from sparse records, such as radiosondes or paleoclimate proxies, actually work on longer time scales

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	climate change; statistics; climate reconstruction;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units, ICARUS
Item ID:	6542
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.1825
Depositing User:	Peter Thorne
Date Deposited:	05 Nov 2015 15:19
Journal or Publication Title:	International Journal of Climatology
Publisher:	Royal Meteorological Society
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1...
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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