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How do we tell which estimates of past climate change are correct?
Author(s) -
Sherwood Steven C.,
Titchner Holly A.,
Thorne Peter W.,
McCarthy Mark P.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
international journal of climatology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.58
H-Index - 166
eISSN - 1097-0088
pISSN - 0899-8418
DOI - 10.1002/joc.1825
Subject(s) - proxy (statistics) , climatology , estimator , climate change , econometrics , paleoclimatology , variance (accounting) , environmental science , radiosonde , consistency (knowledge bases) , climate model , statistics , meteorology , computer science , geography , mathematics , geology , economics , oceanography , accounting , artificial intelligence
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. Copyright © 2008 Royal Meteorological Society