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Study Demonstrates the Importance of Data Management When Downscaling3 min read

by Joey Besl on December 12, 2022

Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division
Mean of historical trends in June, July, and August-mean daily-maximum temperature for each climate division in California. Results are shown as a function of the start year of the historical period (which always ends in 2005) used to calculate trends.

Mean of historical trends in June, July, and August-mean daily-maximum temperature for each climate division in California. Results are shown as a function of the start year of the historical period (which always ends in 2005) used to calculate trends.

Global climate models can help show the planet’s future, but what if you want to zoom in on an individual spot on the map? To get more local information, climate scientists commonly use an approach called downscaling to make global data relevant to an individual area. Downscaling relies, in part, on comparing the observed historical relationships between local and large-scale weather to make global models relevant to the local level. But downscaling is a tricky business, even in a heavily instrumented data-rich place like California.

For example, some historical records show that coastal California had cooled over the past few decades even while the rest of the state warmed up. The contrast between cooling and warming is counterintuitive to climate trends and suggests less warming in coastal California in the future. This anomaly raised a red flag for Dan Feldman of Berkeley Lab and his colleagues at Indiana University. So they decided to investigate. The team found that while the observations of the past decades are robust, the historical records built from those observations include potentially compromised data. 

“There’s a lot of great information in those historical temperature records,” said Feldman, a staff scientist in the national lab’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, “but for any large long-term temperature record, the technology will change.” 

Some climate records are more than a century old, meaning the record needs to consider not just what was measured, but also how. Older weather stations may have disruptions in the data. Some datasets, especially in cities, have weather stations that moved over time to accommodate land-use changes – like a highway or housing project built nearby. Feldman and his colleagues discovered that the historical records that do carefully consider how temperature data are collected do not show coastal cooling. This finding has major implications for future projections of downscaled coastal temperatures in California. 

Their results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that there are major differences in the six historical datasets they looked at exactly because some datasets consider how temperature records were collected and some do not. Two of the models used homogenized data sets, which took into account how temperature records were collected. Four used non-homogenized data sets, incorporating only raw data without taking into account how temperature records were collected. Rather, evidence of coastal cooling in California only showed up in the non-homogenized data. 

The study demonstrates the importance of data management when downscaling. Simply choosing a model that worked well with historical observations could open the door for serious errors,  if you don’t also consider how the observations were collected.  The apparent, but ultimately artificial, California coastal cooling that inspired this study is one example of such an error.  By carefully looking at both the data and how it is collected, climate modelers can provide local users with more accurate information.

Homogenized data that’s appropriately downscaled will allow cities and communities to better plan for a warming climate. Likewise, uninterrupted data paint a more realistic picture of temperature trends. “There is always a range of projections for what climate conditions will be in the future, and it’s easier to look at the lower end of the range and hope that’s what’s going to happen,” said Feldman. “I think it’s harder to look at the upper end of that range and plan for that, but we have to make sure that the lower end of the range isn’t overly optimistic and the upper end of the range isn’t overly pessimistic.”

News & Events

Joint Berkeley Initiative for Microbiome Sciences Hosts Microbes in a Changing Planet Symposium3 min read

November 10, 2023

The Joint Berkeley Initiative for Microbiome Sciences (JBIMS), co-led by UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, held an all-day “Microbes in a Changing Planet” symposium at UC Berkeley’s International House on November 3. Over 110 people from 11 institutions, including undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and lab scientists, attended to share their work regarding Earth’s microbiomes,…

2023 ESS-DIVE Open Data Workshop (ODW) to Propel Environmental System Science Projects into the Future4 min read

November 6, 2023

The Environmental Systems Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE) team will host a free, virtual Open Data Workshop from Wednesday, November 15 to Thursday, November 16, 2023, from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. PT / 12:00 to 5:00 p.m. ET. This workshop is targeted for anyone who is part of a DOE Environmental…

Study Sheds Light on Microbial Communities in Earth’s Subsurface2 min read

August 16, 2023

  From the tops of tree canopies to the bottom of groundwater reservoirs, a vast amount of living organisms interact with nonliving components such as rock, water, and soil to shape this area of Earth known as the “critical zone.” Over half of Earth’s microbes are located in the subsurface critical zone, which ranges from…

Carl Steefel Honored in Goldschmidt Session on Reactive Transport2 min read

August 2, 2023

The contributions of Carl Steefel to the reactive transport modeling scientific community were recognized in a session held in his honor at the recent Goldschmidt 2023 conference (Lyon, France). Goldschmidt is the foremost annual, international conference on geochemistry and related subjects, organized by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. The session was…

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