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NASA Releases Massive Climate Change Data Set

An anonymous reader writes: NASA is releasing global climate change projections to help scientists and planners better understand local and global effects of hazards. The data includes both historical measurements from around the world and simulated projections based on those measurements. "The NASA climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe." You can download them and look through the projections yourself at NASA's Climate Model Data Services page.

6 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Is this the un"adjusted" raw data? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is this the un"adjusted" raw data, or does it have the various "adjustments" that have been applied to the historical data before in past releases?

    In my opinion, to conduct proper science on climatological measurements, the raw measurements should be available to all, to let everyone apply any "adjustments" and "corrections" they believe are necessary - and justified - taking them into account. Then each can properly check the works of their predecessors, and reach their own conclusions, without incorporating unknown distortions from previous work.

    If the maintainers of the archive believe adjustments are needed to deal with some measurement pathology, they are welcome to also release an open correction dataset or tool in parallel.

    With the low price and high speed of modern digital storage and processing devices, data set size and complexity is no excuse for withholding the raw data.

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    1. Re:Is this the un"adjusted" raw data? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      NASA has become too political -- I am unable to trust their prediction models.

      That is complete rubbish. You might have political reasons to dislike the data, models and predictions presented by NASA, but what evidence do you have that NASA has manipulated any of their work for political reasons? How have they "become too political" when they haven't changed what they do or say? If their results match the results of the rest of the scientific community but not what the Republican party says, are they being political or are the Republicans just wrong?

      We keep hearing accusations that they (and others) fudge their figures to get more funding, but in a world where institutions that contradict the views of those in charge get defunded and disbanded, why would they mislead the public in such a suicidal manner?

  2. Re:your opinion is worthless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You read one chapter of a textbook dealing with a subject you know nothing about. You didn't understand it. Based on this, you conclude that the entire field and others related to it are wrong?

    For those who wonder why the world is such a clusterf*ck these days, look no further. This guy is not only out there, but there are millions more like him, and they're probably all breeding.

    God help us all.

  3. Re:Projections based on what? by silentcoder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >Considering we don't know what the temperature will be tomorrow, or whether it will rain at my house, I'm pretty sure we don't know what the climate will be in 100 years. So, not settled in my book.

    That's a ridiculously stupid claim to make. Climate is a LOT simpler than weather. Many, many orders of magnitude simpler. Why ? Because climate is an average.

    If I ask you to predict the final results of a high school student randomly chosen, odds are you'd get it wrong almost every time.
    If I give you a bunch of background information on him and his grades up until now, you'll get it right more often but almost never 100% for all subjects and there will still be outliers that surprize you.
    Predicting a kid's final results is HARD -even with lots of data.

    On the other hand - if I ask you to predict the average grade distribution for the state of New York for an entire high-school senior class and you say "It will be a normal-distribution" you will be right almost every time ! In fact, we're so confident in that outcome that if it's anything else that is - in and off itself - legally considered proof that there was large-scale cheating in the exam !

    Same principle - even when it's VERY hard to predict a single data point, predicting an AVERAGE of those data points is far easier.
    Climate is an average of weather over long periods (30 years typically). That's a LOT simpler to predict than the individual weather points that make it up.

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  4. Re:Projections. by silentcoder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No war in Iraq -> No ISIS today.

    ISIS exists only because of the crapshoot that Bush created with his stupid war.

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    Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  5. Re:Projections based on what? by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Considering you can't even predict whether you'll die tomorrow, it seems ridiculous to claim you'll be dead in 100 years.

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