20CRv3 Diagnostics

This is a set of analyses of the newly-released NOAA/CIRES/DOE Twentieth Century Reanalysis version 3 (20CRv3). It compares 20CRv3 to 20CRv2c, to CERA-20C, and to newly-digitised observations from around the British Isles.

Get the data

The 20CRv3 data used here is distributed through the NERSC web portal. It can be downloaded directly.

Data from scout runs can be obtained (with some effort) by following these instructions.

Stripes plots

Latitude:time plots of monthly averages.

• TMP2m
• PRMSL
• PRATE

Comparisons of 20CRv3 with 20CRv2c

• Tropical Storms
  • Hurricane Andrew (1992)
  • Super-Typhoon Nancy (1961)
  • Hurricane Carla (1961)
  • The Gold Coast Cyclone (1954)
  • Typhoon Kathleen (1947)
  • Okeechobee Hurricane (1928)
  • Galveston Hurricane (1900)
• European windstorms
  • Lothar storm of 1999
  • Burn’s Day (Daria) storm of 1990
  • North Sea flood of 1953
  • Ulysses storm of 1903
  • North German Express of 1894
  • Daria’s sister storm of 1884
  • Lothar’s brother (Marzorkan) of 1876
  • UK storm of 1872
  • Royal Charter Storm of 1859
  • Irish Gale of 1843
  • Christmas Storm of 1811
• Extreme months
  • British Isles in October 1903
• North American severe weather
  • Sitka Hurricane (1880)
• Australian east coast lows
  • Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race storm of 1998
  • Maitland gale of 1898
• Cold Surges
  • South American cold surge of 2005

Validation against observations

The new observations rescued from the Daily Weather Reports have not yet been used by any reanalysis, so they are ideal for validation. Doing the comparison for several different times during the period covered by the new observations shows the effect of varying reanalysis and observation quality.

• Validation against observations for January 1872
• Validation against observations for Spring 1903
• Validation against observations for February 1953
• Validation Spread v. Error plot January 1872 + Spring 1903 + February 1953

Observations and fog videos

• Observations coverage video
• Weather and fog in 1903
• Weather and fog in 1931
• Weather and fog in the Arctic in 1880 and 1881
• Weather and fog 1850-2015
• Just the fog 1850-2015

Boundary conditions

• Boundary conditions
  • Volcanic Aerosols from Crowley and Unterman

Small print

• Authors and acknowledgements

This document and the data associated with it, are crown copyright (2018) and distributed under the terms of the Open Government Licence. All code included is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.