Climate

Climate Data

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent report stated: 'most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.' Many of these observations came from meteorological offices from all over the world. Since temperature and precipitation are principal variables of any climate change model, they are considered key input data.
The Climatic Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK presents a climatological data base for this century, version 2.1 is currently available. It comprises amongst other items monthly temperature, precipitation datasets for global land areas from 1901 to 2002, gridded at 0.5° latitude by 0.5° longitude resolution. See here  for more information about the data set and proper references.

The Global Historical Climatology Network site (GHCN), hosted by CDIAC, is a comprehensive source of both historical temperature and precipitation records. Version 1 contained data from more than 6,000 temperature stations, 7,500 precipiation stations and 2,000 pressure stations. The earliest data record was from 1697, the most recent from 1990. The update of version 1, version 2.0, is available at NCDC.  CDIAC Trends presents an overview of several long term temperature datasets.

Other interesting sources for historical climate data are:

• The Climate Analysis Section (CAS) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), with precipitation, sea surface temperature and surface temperature for different spatial and temporal resolutions. 
• World Meteorological Organization (WMO).  
• The Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the 
• National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS).  
• The Dutch Royal Met Office (KNMI), hosts a European Climate Assessment Database.  

Concentration of Greenhouse gases

The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC) presents an overview of reconstructions of several climate relevant greenhouse gases, ranging from long-term historical records from Ice Cores (e.g. the Vostok series) till more recent continuous measurements (e.g. The Mauna Loa measurements (Keeling and others 1989) provide a continuous record since 1959 of mean annual atmospheric CO2).

See also the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), and its predecessors (the Atmospheric Life Experiment, ALE, and the Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment, GAGE) which have been measuring the composition of the global atmosphere continuously since 1978.