5th Seminar for homogenization - 2006

Proceedings of the Fifth Seminar for Homogenization and Quality Control in Climatological Databases

The First Seminar on Homogenisation was organized ten years ago in 1996. The basic questions were the distribution of homogenisation methods and the overall use of homogenous (homogenised) time series in climate change studies in that time. Homogenisation was not widely accepted, and the generally recommended methods had very simple and poor mathematical basis.

The general view has been changed since then. Homogenisation became a basic element of the data quality procedure, although many of the recommendations of the First Seminar are not fulfilled even today. The information on the applied homogenisation method is not always published along with the time series, however we have many good examples already.

At the same time, research community requires more and more from the experts on homogenisation. Nowadays, one of the largest, still not fully solved problems is the homogenisation of daily time series. Many, very important indices are calculated from the daily data, and those indices are needed for climate change detection, changes of extreme values, etc.

A new COST Action proposal has the basic task to compare, evaluate and develop homogenisation methods. COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) is open for the appropriate institutions, but supports only the member states. We hope, that this new Action will give a push to the dissemination and development of homogenisation methods not only in Europe, but worldwide.

This seminar is supported by WMO and OMSZ, and we hope that the series of Homogenisation Seminars can co-operate with different other initiative for development of data quality with special regards to homogenisation.