Geoscience Reference
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regions: East Antarctica; the Weddell Sea; and the Bellingshausen, Amundsen, and
Ross Seas (Heil and Allison 1999; WMO 2000).
First of all, it is important to perceive the fact that the discussed climate problems
can be solved only on the basis of a complex study of interactions of all major
climate system components. Moreover, the climate problem should be considered
as a part of a much more general and extremely dif
cult problem of study and
simulation of NSS dynamics. This approach is based and has been constructively
realized in some recent publications (Krapivin and Varotsos 2007, 2008; Krapivin
and Shutko 2012). Unfortunately, such developments within WCRP and related
projects are still (in the context under discussion) deprived of the needed systematic
and constructive character.
As for some aspects of IGBP (and
first of all, in the context of COPES), the
following problems, in particular, need further consideration and more convincing
substantiation:
1. Adequacy of available observational database from the viewpoint of
its
completeness and reliability.
As an example illustrating the urgency of such problems, one can refer to the
data on mean annual mean global SAT. As Essex and McKitrick (2002) have justly
noted, even de
nition and meaning of this notion have not been clearly substan-
tiated, though it is these data on mean global SAT for the last 1.5 century that have
formed the basis of the most important conclusions about the nature of present
climate change and various practical recommendations (including the KP). Of no
less importance is the fact that the global mean SAT is the product of averaging
with the use of rather fragmentary information (especially it refers to the late 19th to
early 20th century), consisting of a combination of the data of air temperature
observations on land (the problem of
filtering out the contribution of the urban
“
heat
islands
from observations at meteorological stations has not been adequately
solved as yet) and results of ship observations of water temperature in the upper
layer of the ocean, methodically complicated and far from being representative. One
of the convincing illustrations of discrepancy (and insuf
”
cient reliability) of
available meteorological information is a heated discussion on principally important
differences between the data on SAT trends and results of tropospheric temperature
retrieval from the data of satellite microwave observations (Kondratyev 2004a, b;
Christy and Spencer 2003). One more illustration is unreliable manifestation of the
so-called
(a sharp increase of mean global SAT for the last decades
at the background of a weak variability during the previous millennium, which
excludes, in particular, phenomena such as
“
hockey stick
”
which is of principal
importance for characteristic of the global warming (McIntyre and McKitrick
2003). On the one hand, it means a necessity to continue analysis of reliability of
information on global mean SAT values (there is no doubt that the
“
Little Ice Age
”
“
orthodox
”
estimation of global warming 0.6
C is conditional). On the other hand, there
is an acute need of substantiation of a single global system of climate observations
in the context of global change.
As for the latter circumstance, at
±
0.2
°
first sight, the situation is quite safe: during the
last years, some programs have been developed, such as GCOS, GOOS, GTOS
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