The Language of Visual Business Intelligence

Climate Change and Data

Futuretech Labs - Monday, December 14, 2009
*UPDATE* - The UK Met Office data was made available today: http://bit.ly/7mWJbx (scroll to the bottom) or direct link: All.zip (3.7MB). Here’s the corresponding station codes per country.

I thought this was interesting now all our eyes set in Copenhagen, in what is arguably, one of the most important meetings ever held. This really is, our greatest challenge yet, for humankind. Manuel Lima follows a bit of relevant scandal in his blog www.visualcomplexity.com ; the UK Met Office decided to make available the data for more than 1,000 weather stations from across the world. The dataset, to be released this week, is the subset of stations evenly distributed across the globe and provides a “fair representation of changes in mean temperature on a global scale over land”, said the Met Office in a statement. “We are confident this subset will show that global average land temperatures have risen over the last 150 years.”


A group of scientists at RealClimate.org have recently put together a cohesive list of datasources, from innumerous satellites and stations, on sea levels, sea temperature, surface temperature, aerosols, greenhouse gases, and many more. In a blog post announcing the list, the group state:

Much of the discussion in recent days has been motivated by the idea that climate science is somehow unfairly restricting access to raw data upon which scientific conclusions are based. This is a powerful meme and one that has clear resonance far beyond the people who are actually interested in analysing data themselves. However, many of the people raising this issue are not aware of what and how much data is actually available.

This represents a great reason and momentum for all  involved in Visualisation at large to be part of the solution and deliver a clear view on what’s happening with our planet. Work to be done!