With the prospect of the data changing, due to the latest news from the Met Office, should we stop the long range calculations until the data files have been updated?

They say in their press release \"This initiative will augment, not replace, the current temperature data sets and involve work across the international meteorological community.\"

I don\'t think climate modeling and climate change research is going to halt while more detailed data sets are being worked on. The press release is rather vague and one has a hard time inferring what changes, if any, would be done with past data. But that matters little since the models we run do not depend on extreme detail in the initial conditions, and the model\'s resolution favors more information about global conditions, rather than local/regional conditions.

The CPDN models use lots of different combinations of starting conditions (parameter values) within ranges of plausible values. Some values may never have occurred, but they are within the plausible ranges. So we are exploring a very wide set of possibilities, some more probable than others. Our models are added to ensembles; we\'re not generating one definitive model.

At a conference about climate that I went to in London last year a researcher not from CPDN said we need models to explore an even wider range of values.

Of course, the boundaries of the ranges of plausible values may need to be modified as new data from measurements emerges.

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Cpdn news

Met Office press release: New global temperature analyses