sits perched on a frigid summit in the Austrian Alps, 10,000 feet above sea level. It is one of the highest weather stations in Europe where meteorologists still live on the premises.2.1 degrees Celsius Back then, local gold miners trudged through waist-high snow drifts to carry construction materials up the mountain.
“Much like what happens today, what prompts people to be interested in weather data?” said Jon Nese, a meteorology professor at Penn State. “Disasters.” In recent decades, meteorologists have relied on those records — and thousands more like them — to compare how the world’s climate used to be with how it is now. And as more observations from the past are retrieved from dusty archives worldwide, they point to the possibility of even more precipitous warming.Station density is key in a weather network. The closer the stations are to one another, the more comprehensive the weather records are.
Some stations recorded temperatures in a variety of units now antiquated, such as Réaumurs, rather than Celsius; others fixed their prime meridian at Paris rather than Greenwich, England, the location of the now globally accepted prime meridian. Such inconsistencies force today’s climate scientists to double as historians, digging into the methodologies of old temperature records to determine the appropriate adjustments.
“The bottom line is that any adjustments are relatively small in the global mean,” said Gavin Schmidt, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Neither are the calculated uncertainties anywhere close enough to affect the overall trends.” Some climate scientists theorize that they may discover additional warming when they incorporate these extensive records of weather between 1780 and 1850 or so, a period during which people already were burning some fossil fuels and clearing land of trees.