The U.S. CCSP report on temperature trends includes the following remarkable recommendations on audit trails:
The independent development of data sets and analyses by several independent scientists or teams will serve to quantify structural uncertainty and to provide objective corroboration of the results. In order to encourage further independent scrutiny, data sets and their full metadata (footnote 1) should be made openly available. Comprehensive analyses should be carried out to ascertain the causes of remaining differences between data sets and to refine uncertainty estimates.
In their text, they say:
To ascertain unambiguously the causes of differences in data sets generally requires extensive metadata for each data set (C4; NRC, 2000b). Appropriate metadata, whether obtained from the peer-reviewed literature or from data made available on-line, should include, for data on all relevant spatial and temporal scales:
“⠠Documentation of the raw data and the data sources used in the data set construction to enable quantification of the extent to which the raw data overlap with other similar data sets;
“⠠Details of instrumentation used, the observing practices and environments and their changes over time to help assessments of, or adjustments for, the changing accuracy of the data;
“⠠Supporting information such as any adjustments made to the data and the numbers and locations of the data through time;
“⠠An audit trail of decisions about the adjustments made, including supporting evidence that identifies non-climatic influences on the data and justifies any consequent adjustments to the data that have been made; and
“⠠Uncertainty estimates and their derivation.
This information should be made openly available to the research community.
For this chapter, the Convening Lead Author: Chris K. Folland, U.K. Met. Office; Lead Authors were: D.E. Parker, U.K. Met. Office; R.W. Reynolds, NOAA; S.C. Sherwood, Yale Univ.; P.W. Thorne, U.K. Met. Office.
Nice to see the term “audit trail” in a climate science publication. But how do these guys reconcile these pieties with acquiescence in total obstruction by Phil Jones and the Hockey Team? Now Folland himself is an important originator of SST data – maybe somneone should see how they do with requesting data and meta data from him?