Earth Science—Air, Climate, and Weather
The sources in this chapter provide meteorological and climatological data—that is, data on weather (i.e., short-term events) and climate (long-term patterns), including indicators of climate change. Data on air pollution is also covered, although other forms of pollution are addressed in chapters 5 and 7. Sources that contain climatological or meteorological data along with data on other earth science disciplines also appear in chapter 5. Most of the data on the emission of greenhouse gases is covered in this chapter, but there is additional information on gases from burning certain fuels in chapter 18.
Major Sources: United States
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the primary source for data on climate and weather in the United States, and it also disseminates a large amount of data for the rest of the world. This data—which includes everything from numeric data recorded by thousands of weather stations worldwide, to archived radar data, to historical climate data based on tree rings—is distributed through a variety of sites, but the most comprehensive selection is available through Climate.gov (www.climate.gov). This site allows users to perform a keyword search on, or to browse through, approximately three hundred climate-related and weather-related data sets produced or distributed by NOAA. The date ranges vary for different geographic areas and types of data, but some land-based weather observation data is available for the nineteenth century, and ship-based observations for some ocean areas can even be found for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The most user-friendly way to find data on Climate.gov may be the map applications. Some of these applications allow users to visualize the data online, but all of them allow users to choose locations, typically by drawing shapes on a map, and to download data for the locations within that area. For several of the maps, a “simplified” data access option allows for easy downloading, or one can choose the “advanced” access option for more control over variables.
Unfortunately, for many of the maps, once a user has selected locations he or she is sent to a legacy NOAA site to complete the download process, and the interfaces for these legacy sites are not always as user-friendly as they could be. In some cases data cannot be downloaded directly from the site; users have to select the data they want and enter their e-mail address, and the site then e-mails them a link to download their selected data. Data formats vary; any particular data set may be available as human-friendly PDFs, spreadsheet-friendly CSV files, or plain-text ASCII files, among other possible formats.
One particular strength of Climate.gov is its wide range of paleoclimatic data—data about the climate of the distant past. This includes data gathered from ice cores, fossilized plankton, and lake sediments, to name just a few examples. Many of these data sets can be downloaded in KML format, which allows them to be explored in Google Earth, and bulk downloads via FTP are also available for many data sets. Data produced by various climate models is also available.
Environmental Protection Agency
The Environmental Protection Agency Data Finder (www.epa.gov/datafinder/) is the primary gateway to data on air pollution, as well as other forms of pollution, in the United States. Since the EPA considers carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be a form of air pollution, it also gathers and disseminates data on the emission of those gases.
The EPA releases data through various tools and portals, some intended for broad audiences and some for sophisticated researchers who need very raw data. One good example of this is the Air Quality System (AQS), which contains hourly or daily data about the level of several different air pollutants at hundreds of locations, 1980 to present. Data from AQS is available through three different interfaces. Raw data on dozens of air pollutants can be accessed via the AQS Data Mart (www.epa.gov/ttn/airs/aqsdatamart/access.htm), although users must e-mail the EPA and request access to the system. Less advanced users will likely prefer to access the data via AirData (www.epa.gov/airdata/), which allows options such as viewing summary statistics and creating tile plots, time-series plots, and animated maps showing the levels of six primary air pollutants at selected locations in the United States. Another user-friendly access point to the AQS data is the AirCompare site (www.epa.gov/aircompare/), which allows users to compare the air quality of different counties or states, or at different times of year, in up to ten counties.
Two EPA programs disseminate data on the pollutants released by individual plants or other facilities, with one focusing specifically on greenhouse gases and the other providing data for air pollution more broadly. The former, the Facility Level Information on Greenhouse Gases Tool (FLIGHT, http://ghgdata.epa.gov/ghgp/main.do), allows users to browse information about the metric tons of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and various fluorinated gases released by thousands of individual plants or other facilities that are major emitters of these gases. Bulk downloads of this data are also available. The latter, the Air Facility System Search (AFS, www.epa.gov/enviro/facts/afs/search.html), allows users to search for facilities within a given geographic area and to view information about those facilities’ compliance with regulations governing the release of air pollutants.
Comprehensive data on the emission of air pollutants is published every three years as part of the National Emissions Inventory (NEI, www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/eiinformation.html). Like the systems discussed in the previous paragraph, this data set contains “point data” on individual facilities that release air pollutants, but it also includes estimates for what is called “nonpoint data”—sources of air pollution that are not inventoried by current reporting and compliance programs, such as the pollution released by the furnaces in individual homes. The data set also contains estimates of the air pollutants released by “mobile sources,” such as airplanes, farm machinery, and motor vehicles. Data can be downloaded at the national, state, county, or tribal area level and is also available broken down by sources, such as “wildfires,” “dry cleaning,” or “locomotives.”
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facilitates access to a great deal of data on climate change through its Global Change Master Directory (GCMD, http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov). This site brings together metadata from thousands of data sets from dozens of research projects, including both research done by NASA itself and research by other scientists, international organizations, foreign government agencies, and other organizations. Several discovery methods are provided: users can keyword search across the whole collection, browse by topic across the whole collection, draw bounding boxes on a map and find all data pertaining to areas contained in the box, or enter separate portals organized by data providers and research projects. The types of data covered range broadly, including topics from paleoclimates and atmospheric chemistry to solar activity and fungi. The site is, however, a data directory, not a database; users must follow links to the sites of the organizations that produced the data sets in order to access them.
Major Sources: World
World Meteorological Organization
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which is part of the UN system, publishes “standard normals” for various climate indicators. These measures typically represent an average for one of three thirty-year periods—1901–1930, 1931–1960, and 1961–1990—although in some cases other time periods were used. Some of these standard normals, such as the monthly maximum and minimum air temperature, have been computed for hundreds of locations in more than one hundred countries, but in other cases data has been produced only for a much shorter list of locations. The 1961–1990 data is most readily available; it is disseminated both through the UNdata site (see chapter 3) and through Climate.gov (discussed above). Additional WMO data, including daily weather observations for thousands of stations around the world, can also be accessed through the map applications or the bulk data downloads on Climate.gov.
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
Although the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC, http://cdiac.ornl.gov) is a U.S. government agency (in the U.S. Department of Energy), it is one of the major global sources for data about the emission of greenhouse gases. CDIAC hosts the World Data Center for Atmospheric Trace Gases, and its data on carbon dioxide emissions is one of the official indicators used by the United Nations to monitor progress toward the Millennium Development Goals related to environmental sustainability (and thus some CDIAC data on carbon dioxide emissions can be found in the many databases that include the Millennium Development Goals indicators, such as UNdata). CDIAC provides access to dozens of data sets related to carbon dioxide and climate change. In addition to the previously mentioned data on carbon dioxide emissions, its website also allows users to find and access information such as concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere both presently and historically; historical estimates of carbon dioxide emissions back to 1751; carbon stored in biomass and soils; and historical weather and climate indicators such as temperature, precipitation, and clouds. In addition to data on carbon dioxide, some data on ozone, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, carbon monoxide, and other gases is available.
Minor Sources
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, http://unfccc.int/ghg_data/items/3800.php) gathers data on the emission of various greenhouse gases, 1990 to present. Unlike the CDIAC carbon dioxide emissions data, which contains annual estimates for more than two hundred countries and territories, the UNFCCC has comprehensive annual data only for the forty-two countries that are parties to Annex I of the Climate Change Convention, plus Kazakhstan. For many other countries, information is available for some years. All of the data is self-reported by the individual countries.
Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (European Commission)
The Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR, http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php), one of several Joint Research Centres sponsored by the European Commission, provides estimates of the emissions of several different types of harmful gases, including greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane, and several different fluorinated gases), particulate matter, and gases that contribute to acid rain (e.g., sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides). Data is available by country or economic sector, or in a gridded format, with emissions per 0.1 degree by 0.1 degree cell. Several different data sets cover different time periods with different degrees of precision; the oldest estimates go back to 1890, whereas the most detailed data is available only for recent years.
European Environment Agency
The European Environment Agency, part of the European Union, distributes data sets about a wide range of environmental issues in the countries of Europe (www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data). These include several useful, detailed data sets about air quality and emissions. One data set contains plant-level data on emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates (“dust”) for thousands of plants in twenty-seven European countries. Another, AirBase, contains air quality data for thousands of locations across the continent. There are also country-level data sets on emission of air pollutants.