Hans Von Storch - Publications and Awards

Publications and Awards

In late 2004 his team published an article in Science that tested multiproxy methods such as those used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, 1998, often called MBH98, or Mann and Jones to obtain the global temperature variations in the past 1000 years. The test showed that the method used in MBH98 would inherently underestimate large variations had they occurred; but has subsequently been challenged: see hockey stick controversy for more detail.

To reach this conclusion, von Storch et al. used a climate model to generate a series of annual temperature maps for the world over the past several centuries. They then added white noise to the proxy data and applied the methods used in MBH98, a variation of principal component analysis, to the computed temperature maps and found that the amount of variation was considerably reduced.

In April 2006, Science published a comment, authored by Wahl and collaborators, asserting errors in the 2004 paper, stating that "their conclusion was based on incorrect implementation of the reconstruction procedure" a mistake with Repercussions; and a disputing VS Reply. In this reply, VS and his team demonstrated that caveats raised in the Wahl comment did not invalidate their original conclusion. The inadequacy of the MBH98 methodology for climate reconstructions was later independently confirmed in other publications, for instance by Lee, Zwiers and Tsao, 2008 or by Christiansen et al., 2009.

Von Storch received the IMSC achievement award at the International Meetings on Statistical Climatologyin Edinburgh in 2010, to "recognize his key contributions to statistical downscaling, reconstruction of temperature series, analyses of climatic variability, and detection and attribution of climate change."