final_program_abstracts[1]

11 IMSC Session Program
An approach for reconstructing historical global monthly sea
surface temperatures
Monday - Parallel Session 4
Yoshikazu Fukuda 1 , Shoji Hirahara 1 and Masayoshi Ishii 2,3
1 Climate Prediction Division, Japan Meteorological Agency, Japan
2 Meteorological Research Institute, Japan Meteorological Agency, Japan
3 Japan Agency for Marine-Science and Technology, Japan
Reconstructed sea surface temperatures (SSTs) on a centennial scale are needed for
climate model initialization and prediction as well as long-term climate monitoring.
The reconstruction analysis produces SSTs with a homogenized quality in space and
time. According to our cross-validation studies made so far, errors in global mean
SSTs and other areal averages are reduced by conducting reconstruction significantly
in cases of data sparse, in comparison with straightforward analysis such as optimal
interpolation.
A newly developed scheme for reconstruction of historical global monthly SSTs is
introduced. In our latest reconstruction analysis, monthly SSTs are estimated from
separated analyses of long-term trends and interannual variations. When
reconstructing SSTs, we consider additional variations on a shorter time scale than a
month, in order to avoid a statistically simple structure inherently in the reconstructed
monthly SSTs and to compensate a part of SST variability ignored in the
reconstruction due to truncation. The quality of the reconstructed SSTs is evaluated
by using a cross validation method. Uncertain features of the reconstructed SST are
also discussed, comparing with counterparts produced by other centers.
Abstracts 61