From: Phil Jones To: Kevin Trenberth Subject: A quick question Date: Tue Dec 21 11:39:09 2004 Kevin, No idea how Chris Folland got this. Presumably David Parker forwarded it ! Anyway, it doesn't matter. The questions are: When will you be sending me your signed-off draft? Will this be the complete doc file of text? Will you be modifying any of the figures? On the latter just want to know if I'm keeping track of figs as well as Refs. I've got the two you sent last night. I'll be off from 5pm on Dec 23. I'll begin reading the draft from Dec 29. Will likely be in at least once on Dec 29-31, but will be checking email from Dec 29. Cheers Phil All As someone who dealt with these matters in the past, a decision about the climate normals period was regarded as so important that all of WG1 debated it and agreed the outcome. So that should be the route again, I believe, if a change is wanted. From a personal perspective, I tend to agree with Phil that this time we should stick (in general) to 1961-90 normals, and that IPCC 2013 should perhaps change to 1981-2010. Having said that, we may produce 1981-2000 normals in the next year for SST if we can solve adequately remaining problems (for climate change monitoring) with satellite SSTs. A key goal is monitoring changes in the Southern Ocean. Solutions are likely to include use of some corrected (to bulk SST data) ATSR data. This depends on work elsewhere in the Met Office. However, some less well corrected AVHRR data is needed as well to extend normals adequately back to 1981 in much of the Southern Ocean.This may give a new perspectives on the southern ocean SST changes; are likely to be significantly different in the southern half of the southern ocean from the global average. This is suggested by the lack of reduction of Antarctic sea ice, in contrast to the Arctic, which still persists. Such work may or may not get into IPCC FAR but if it did, it could be a special case. But it would need careful handling for conversion to advice to policy makers. Chris Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090 School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784 University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ----------------------------------------------------------------------------