Climatic Research Unit - Activities

Activities

At the time of its establishment the CRU set out four key aims, which still remain valid:

• To establish firmer knowledge of the history of climate in the recent and distant past.
• To monitor and report on current climatic developments on a global scale.
• To identify the processes (natural and man-made) at work in climatic fluctuations and the characteristic timescales of their evolution.
• To investigate the possibilities of making advisory statements about future trends of weather and climate from a season to many years ahead, based on acceptable scientific methods and in a form likely to be useful for long-term planning purposes.

One of the CRU's most significant products is the global near-surface temperature record compiled in conjunction with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. First compiled in the early 1980s, the record documents global temperature fluctuations since the 1850s. The CRU compiles the land component of the record and the Hadley Centre provides the marine component. The merged record is used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in all its publications. It is also involved in a study of Eurasian climate over the last 10,000 years based upon tree ring data and a study of European climate in the last 200 years based upon temperature records. It is a participant in MEDALUS — the Mediterranean Desertification and Land Use project. The ultimate custodians of the raw data are the national meteorological services that originated the data; CRU retains most but not all of the raw data, which continues to be held by the originating services.

It published a quarterly journal, Climate Monitor. This ceased publication in 1998, being replaced by an online version, Climate Monitor Online.

The CRU collates data from many sources around the world. Its director, Phil Jones, told the science journal Nature in 2009 that he was working to make the data publicly available with the agreement of its owners but this was expected to take some months, and objections were anticipated from national meteorological services that made money from selling the data. It was not free to share that data without the permission of its owners because of confidentiality agreements, including with institutions in Spain, Germany, Bahrain and Norway, that restricted the data to academic use. In some cases the agreements were made orally, and some of the written agreements had been lost during a move. Despite this, the CRU has been the focus of attention by climate change sceptics who have made numerous requests under the Freedom of Information Act for data used by the unit's scientists. Nature reported that in the course of five days in July 2009 the CRU had been "inundated" with 58 FOI requests from Stephen McIntyre and people affiliated with his blog Climate Audit requesting access to raw climate data or information about their use.