ESRL Quarterly Newsletter – Spring 2009, http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/news/quarterly/spring2009/reanalysis.html
Today, weather instruments around the globe collect millions of observations daily, giving forecasters and others a fairly comprehensive view of the global atmosphere and upcoming weather. A century ago, a few hundred observers on land and sea—most in the Northern Hemisphere—recorded a few thousand observations a day, at best. Now, ESRL researchers and colleagues around the world have produced realistic guesses at historic atmospheric conditions, based on sparse observations and an understanding of the way the atmosphere behaves today. This is the kind of detailed information that climate and weather researchers and historians have longed for, but accurate information has not been available beyond the past 60 years. The 20th Century Reanalysis project will eventually provide global surface and lower atmosphere weather data from the 1870s to the present.
Led by ESRL researchers, an international research team used Department of Energy supercomputers to stitch together sparse historic observations into an image of the most-likely atmospheric conditions at the time. Their conclusions, they hope, will not only help historians understand how weather affected key events, but will help climate modelers understand Earth’s future.
The 20th Century Reanalysis Project started when NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research began digitizing and making available original manuscript weather observations from the past 100 years. Building on the availability of these data, ESRL Physical Sciences Division and CIRES researchers Gil Compo, Jeff Whitaker, Prashant Sardeshmukh, and Nobuki Matsui proved to skeptics that by analyzing barometric pressure observations it would be possible to figure out the atmospheric patterns that created past weather conditions.
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