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.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-18-1071-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Quantifying and reducing researcher subjectivity in the generation of climate indices from documentary sources
George C. D. Adamson
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR
Department of Geography, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
David J. Nash
School of Applied Sciences, University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom
School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Stefan W. Grab
School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
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An investigation of the wet season characteristics including wet day frequencies, wet–dry spells, and season onset, end and length is done for Cape Town, South Africa. The temporal changes since 1841 in these characteristics indicate an increased incidence of shorter wet seasons and long dry spells in the most recent 3 decades compared to previous years. There is evidence of some associations between solar cycles and the Southern Oscillation index cycles with the wet season characteristics.
Jens Zinke, Takaaki K. Watanabe, Siren Rühs, Miriam Pfeiffer, Stefan Grab, Dieter Garbe-Schönberg, and Arne Biastoch
Clim. Past, 18, 1453–1474, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-18-1453-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-18-1453-2022, 2022
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Salinity is an important and integrative measure of changes to the water cycle steered by changes to the balance between rainfall and evaporation and by vertical and horizontal movements of water parcels by ocean currents. However, salinity measurements in our oceans are extremely sparse. To fill this gap, we have developed a 334-year coral record of seawater oxygen isotopes that reflects salinity changes in the globally important Agulhas Current system and reveals its main oceanic drivers.
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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.
Descriptions of climate held in archives are a valuable source of past climate variability, but...
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