Francis Irving, Clearer Climate Code, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, September 17, 2008.
GISTEMP is a crucial open data set, because it contains the historical global temperature record. ...
Stations that measure temperature naturally do so at specific points in space, and the historical record is additionally contaminated by changes in hardware, urbanisation and other issues. Because of this GISTEMP is made using software that estimates a single global temperature from the measurements using a basic scheme invented by James Hansen in the 1970s.
What is interesting from an open knowledge point of view, is that without this software the GISTEMP data itself is fairly meaningless. ... There have been arguments about the derivation, and to address these the original Fortran software was released into the public domain by NASA in September 2007.
... Nick Barnes (from a company called Ravenbrook) has started a project to rewrite the GISTEMP software in Python, ensuring it produces the same output as the original Fortran.
This open approach to the scientific code and data has already found some rewards. The August 11, 2008 GISTEMP update describes a bug in the original Fortran code which the Python rewrite unearthed ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/18/2008 07:27:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
