cc: p.jones@uea.ac.uk date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:27:32 -0000 (GMT) from: P.Jones@uea.ac.uk subject: Re: Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to: "Mcgarvie Michael Mr \(ACAD\) k364" Michael, Here is another reply as I wasn't sure the first one got through. I know the time is ridiculous, but I can't sleep. See below. Cheers Phil Dear Michael, I am in Paris at the IPCC meeting, which will last for rest of the week. I will be back in CRU on Feb 5, probably very exhausted. I’m sending a reply this way, as I have had difficulty connecting to UEA, and the line keeps breaking. I have tried writing this email at least twice. I must investigate this as well when I get back. I would suggest you contact the Met Office, to get their view on the use of FOIA on this. If you email David Parker (david.parker@metoffice.gov.uk) he will give you the name of their contact on FOIA. This will be a worthwhile contact who may have dealt with more issues like this. The data requested are not on our site or theirs. What is there, as you’ve found out, is gridded data – where we combine the station data, with marine data (which the Hadley Centre, Met Office only have) into a more convenient form – the HadCRUT3 data set. As you have also realized, the volume of data is large. There are over 5000 stations, each having on average about 60 years worth of monthly temperature averages. I suspect this request is from a climate change skeptic who wishes to try and discredit me, by finding some bad data or bad stations which we likely shouldn’t have used. The law of large numbers, however, means that the average is amazing robust to a few outliers. We have also spent years of effort trying to reduce these outliers to a minimum. It would be extremely difficult for anyone to exactly reproduce what we have with the Met Office jointly produced. There are two other files that they would need, which I can explain more about later. I will likely need some advice from UEA on this and also from the Met Office. The data have been collected over many years, and in come cases we have been given data from national met services (NMSs) on the proviso that we do not pass on the raw data to third parties, but we can use them in derived products – such as HadCRUT3. Finally, I’m not sure this data are mine to pass on. I do pass small subsets of the data onto fellow scientists, but never the whole dataset. None of the data are collected by us. We assemble it from what NMSs in all the countries provide over a system called the CLIMATE network. The Met Office have a link to this system, and send us the data once a month for scientific use. Almost all of it isn’t British – there are about 20 British sites – the rest is from other countries. Variants on this dataset can be got from sites in the USA. These are the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC (called the Global Historic Climate Network, GHCN) and also from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder CO. Here it has a dataset number, which I can get when I am back. I hope this gives you a few things to get started upon. As you might have guessed this is probably not something I want to waste much time on. Almost all the funding for the work on developing these datasets has come from the US Dept of Energy. They are happy with me not passing on the station data, as we make the gridded products, which are much easier to use. Also the raw station data have been modified by use, and we don’t still have the original data (as received, or as digitized by us in the 1980s). Cheers Phil > Dear Phil, > > > > The University has received a FOIA request as follows: > > "I would like to obtain a list of the meteorological stations used in > the preparation of the HadCRUT3 global temperature average, and the raw > data for those stations. I cannot find it anywhere on the web. The lead > author for the temperature average is Dr. Phil Jones of the Climate > Research Unit." > > > > I am the Science Faculty contact for FOIA requests and co-ordinate the > requests and responses with the University's FOIA officer (who is > located in the library). > > > > I have had a quick look on the web and have come across the Met Office > and CRU links to the data. I am guessing that these sites contain the > collated data rather than the data as requested by the enquirer (which > must be a massive data set). > > > > Met Office: > > http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/ > > > > CRU: > > http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ > > > > > > With FOIA requests we can point the enquirer to another website if the > information is in the public domain elsewhere. Is there somewhere that > the information which they have requested is available? > > > > The request may be what is called an "ill defined" request, in which > case we can go back and ask for clarification - I am guessing that on > this occasion it is a fairly specific request (but let me know if you > feel otherwise). We have a timescale within which we are required to > respond (by 22 Feb) - which can be lengthened if we require > clarification from the enquirer. > > > > If the information requested is not publicly available, what would be > the time and cost of us providing this? We can charge the enquirer if > it would take more than 18 hours to provide the information. We would > then respond that the information would be made available at a cost of X > and give them the choice of paying and getting the information or > redefining their enquiry or saying no. > > > > Sorry to bother you with this. If there is someone else in CRU who you > would rather I deal with please let me know. And do give me a call on > 3229 if you want to discuss this. > > > > Regards > > > > Michael > > > > > > Michael McGarvie > > Senior Faculty Manager > > Faculty of Science > > Room 0.22C > > University of East Anglia > > Norwich NR4 7TJ > > tel: 01603 593229 > > fax: 01603 593045 > > m.mcgarvie@uea.ac.uk > > > > > > > >