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.

Comments

Re:Projections based on what?

[silentcoder]

>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.