Free at last

We highlight improvements to the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) in the latest Release 3.0 (R3.0; covering 1662–2014). ICOADS is the most widely used freely available collection of surface marine observations, providing data for the construction of gridded analyses of sea surface temperature, estimates of air–sea interaction and other meteorological variables. ICOADS observations are assimilated into all major atmospheric, oceanic and coupled reanalyses, further widening its impact. R3.0 therefore includes changes designed to enable effective exchange of information describing data quality between ICOADS, reanalysis centres, data set developers, scientists and the public. These user-driven innovations include the assignment of a unique identifier (UID) to each marine report – to enable tracing of observations, linking with reports and improved data sharing. Other revisions and extensions of the ICOADS’ International Maritime Meteorological Archive common data format incorporate new near-surface oceanographic data elements and cloud parameters. Many new input data sources have been assembled, and updates and improvements to existing data sources, or removal of erroneous data, made. Coupled with enhanced ‘preliminary’ monthly data and product extensions past 2014, R3.0 provides improved support of climate assessment and monitoring, reanalyses and near-real-time applications.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Well, it’s even more exciting than it sounds, because that’s the abstract of Freeman, E., Woodruff, S. D., Worley, S. J., Lubker, S. J., Kent, E. C., Angel, W. E., Berry, D. I., Brohan, P., Eastman, R., Gates, L., Gloeden, W., Ji, Z., Lawrimore, J., Rayner, N. A., Rosenhagen, G. and Smith, S. R. (2016), ICOADS Release 3.0: a major update to the historical marine climate record. Int. J. Climatol.. doi:10.1002/joc.4775 which has just hit the scientific literature, and which describes the latest version of the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere DataSet, the collection of marine weather data.

Everything about oldWeather has been free from the start: our ambition has always been to make the information in our logbooks openly available for anyone to use, and our results already have seen use in datasets, reanalyses, historical and personal projects, … But whenever anyone asks me “What are you doing with the results of this project?”, I’ve always answered “We’re going to put the new observations in ICOADS – to make them available for all future uses, in climate and other fields”. With ICOADS R3.0, we have finally achieved this: ICOADS is internally arranged in ‘decks’ (a reminder that data collection is older than the digital computer) – it now includes decks 249 “World War I (WW1) UK Royal Navy Logbooks” and 710 “US Arctic Logbooks” – clearly illustrated in figure 1.

I’ve been working as a scientist for a while now, but the publication of a new paper is still something of an event. Scientific papers come in many forms: some describe wild new ideas, brave experiments, or dramatic breakthroughs – this one is nothing like that; it just reports the work of many people, over several years, scavenging observations from wherever we can find them, systematising them, quality controlling them, analysing them, and now releasing them. It makes up for its lack of drama by being useful – the surface marine record is one of the most widely used datasets in all of climate: our observations are used directly in the monitoring datasets that measure climate change, they are assimilated in all reanalyses, they provide boundary conditions and validation for the models we use for predicting future change, and they provide calibration to palaeoclimate reconstructions of the deep past.

So from now on, if you’ve contributed to oldWeather, keep an eye out for any new climate results. Whether it’s a new global temperature record, a prediction of climate for the next generation, a study of changes in flood or drought risk, a government report on climate impacts and adaptation, … anything really. When you see it, square your shoulders and stand a little taller – that result owes something to you.