Climate of the Past
Climate of the Past
CP
Articles | Volume 18, issue 5
Articles | Volume 18, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-18-1071-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Special issue:
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-18-1071-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Articles | Volume 18, issue 5
Research article
 | 
17 May 2022
Research article |  | 17 May 2022

Quantifying and reducing researcher subjectivity in the generation of climate indices from documentary sources

George C. D. Adamson, David J. Nash, and Stefan W. Grab

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Short summary
Descriptions of climate held in archives are a valuable source of past climate variability, but there is a large potential for error in assigning quantitative indices (e.g. −2, v. dry to +2, v. wet) to descriptive data. This is the first study to examine this uncertainty. We gave the same dataset to 71 postgraduate students and 6 professional scientists, findings that error can be minimized by taking an average of indices developed by eight postgraduates and only two professional climatologists.
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International methods and comparisons in climate reconstruction...