File:Merchant - uncertainty-climate-data-space-ESIP-small.pdf

Presentation at monthly meeting of the Information Quality Cluster on May 8, 2018. Abstract: Within the context of the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI), several projects addressing climate data records (CDRs) for a wide variety of essential climate variables worked together on agreeing and articulating some common principles for including uncertainty information in CDRs. Convergence was reached (eventually!) on eight recommendations for good practice on uncertainty information in CDRs. These recommendations should be considered in a wider context of discussion of the trade-offs and motivations involved; these can only briefly be alluded to in this presentation, but are laid out in the full paper on this study ( doi.org/10.5194/essd-9-511-2017 ). The talk will summarise the eight recommendations, which cover how uncertainty can be expressed, validated and contextualised for users. Some obstacles to provision of good uncertainty information will be discussed, a significant factor being the absence of uncertainty information in fundamental climate data records (FCDRs, level 1 data). It will be argued that FCDRs should be provided with uncertainty information adequate to propagate uncertainty to CDRs, and some progress on achieving this within the EU project FIDUCEO (www.fiduceo.org) will be outlined.