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type: Concept

COADS
type: Concept
definition: Scientific Objectives: Growing concerns with effects of climatic anomalies have brought the realization that climate itself is dynamic and that observations from the oceans require the same detailed study that has been devoted to observation from stations on land for over a century. These considerations formed the starting point for the construction of a Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS). Development of COADS is a continuing cooperative effort between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), its Environmental Research Laboratories, National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Initiated in 1981, the COADS project has used modern formats to minimize storage volume and other innovations in data organization to provide for the first-time convenient and efficient access to a unique record of ocean-atmosphere behavior, beginning in 1854 and continuing into the future. Project Description: Global marine data observed during 1854-1979, primarily by ships-of-opportunity, have been collected, edited, and summarized statistically for each month of each year of the period, using 2 degree latitude times 2 degree longitude boxes. Products now available in a first release from this Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set include full quality-controlled (trimmed) reports and summaries. Each of the 70 million unique reports contains 28 elements of weather, position, etc., as well as flags indicating which observations were statistically trimmed. The summaries give 14 statistics, such as the median and mean, for each of eight observed variables of air and sea surface temperatures, wind, pressure, humidity, and cloudiness, plus 11 derived variables. Relatively noisy (untrimmed) individual reports and summaries (giving 14 statistics for each of the eight observed variables) are available for investigat…
in scheme: projects