Historical atmospheric reconstruction (1850-2009)

Map: Hereon/ Frederik Schenk

The historical dataset of High Resolution Atmospheric Forcing Fields (HiResAFF) allows long-term analysis and/or forcing models on longer timescales covering the period 1850–2009. The dataset consists of key meteorological variables Variables such as sea-surface pressure, u- & v-wind, relative humidity, total cloud cover, 2m-temperature and precipitation on daily scale which are typically used to drive ocean or ecosystem models. The fields are reconstructed through non-linear statistical upscaling using the Analog-Method (Schenk and Zorita, 2012). The method resamples atmospheric fields from a regional climate model (RCAO/RCA3) in time based on the closest pattern similarity in the predictor space of homogenous historical station data since 1850. The resampling of atmospheric fields ensures that the properties of different meteorological variables are kept consistent (e.g. probability distributions, variance) while the historical station data is used maintain the temporal correlation of the fields with observations back to 1850. The analog-method and reconstruction skill of HiResAFF is described in Schenk and Zorita (2012) and the extended dataset for 1850-2009 in Schenk (2015). The dataset can be downloaded from the World Data Centre for Climate (WDCC) (see Schenk 2017).
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 217246 made with the joint Baltic Sea research and development programme BONUS, and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (03F0492A).