Global Data Sets for Analysis of Climate Extremes

Abstract

Anthropogenic forced climate change is expected to result in changes in both the mean climate state and climate extremes. Documenting changes in extremes, such as drought, heavy precipitation, heat waves or tropical storms requires long-term observations of climate at sufficiently high temporal resolution to identify individual extreme events and is spatially complete enough to use at both global and regional scales. This chapter discusses various data sets that are suitable for examining changes in extremes in the observed record. Issues discussed include problems with data quality, such as data homogeneity and data availability. Data sets discussed include global sets for monthly and daily temperature and precipitation, tropical cyclones, and reanalyses. In addition, a brief section on climate observing networks is included outlining new networks in the U.S. and Canada that have been designed to alleviate many of the problems discussed here.