In a move to add greater transparency to climate science, researchers are meeting this week in the United Kingdom to discuss plans for a public database that would make the world's leading climate data available to all comers.
The "Climategate" scandal last fall embarrassed climate scientists when researchers' email accounts were broken into, and their personal communications ended up in the hands of the press. The whole incident was blown out of proportion, fueled by climate change deniers, but it raised legitimate questions about scientists' openness in their research and willingness to share complex data with the public.
Currently, scientists and non-scientists alike are frustrated by the inability to precisely predict how climate change will affect a particular location. Peter Stott a researcher at the UK Met Office and organizer of this week's meeting, elaborated on this struggle in an interview with The Guardian:
"It is now very clear that humanity is changing the climate through the greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere. But we don't know yet, and what we really must find out is how those changes will affect a particular area. We need to answer key questions such as whether the onset of the monsoon in India will be delayed, how the frequency of droughts in the Horn of Africa is changing, or whether Europe will experience more severe heat waves in the future."
Part of the reason scientists are facing this wall of uncertainty is because of gaps in climate data. Not all countries are sharing their weather data, and there are still many places in the world where daily temperatures and weather conditions are not consistently monitored. Simply put, scientists lack to the information they need to make precise predictions.
As a way to close these crucial holes in the data record, the climate research community is looking for help from organizations like Google and Galaxy Zoo that rely on volunteers to eagerly amass and/or analyze huge amounts of information in an internet-based open forum.
But in order to crowdsource climate research, scientists need to share their own data. This daunting task involves compiling and translating raw measurements into a usable form. Though a major time sink, the result will help identify the glaring holes in current data and provide a starting point for anyone who is willing to advance climate science.
Have a weather station at home? Perhaps in a few short years, your contribution of reporting daily temperatures and rain frequency might help scientists pinpoint the future of climate in your neighborhood.
Image: Pandiyan, Flickr
Tags: Climate Change, Meteorology, Weather
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