Climate Change Indicators: Zachary Labe – “I’m a Climate Scientist (Atmospheric) at NOAA GFDL | PhD | trying to visualize the signal from a lot of noise. Broadly, I am interested in a signal-to-noise problem. The signal is climate change. The noise is weather. My research intends to disentangle the two components to improve our understanding of climate variability and extreme events in a warming world. I am also interested in improving science communication, particularly through accessible data-driven visualizations.Warming temperatures in the Arctic continue to contribute to rapidly declining sea ice, particularly over the last decade. While interannual variability is inherently noisy, long-term trends continue to indicate declining sea ice extent.”

“All of the raw observational data I use for my climate visualizations is free and publicly available. I have compiled a list of their respective data archives and methodological references below. For more general information about climate data, I highly recommend exploring the NCAR Climate Data Guide (Schneider et al. 2013) and Advancing Reanalysis page. I also discuss specific examples of climate data visualizations in more detail in my monthly blog…Updates to data products are normal and a critical part of the scientific process. Uncertainties in data are real and normal too. I encourage you to compare datasets from different scientific institutions around the world – though you’ll find the same overall climate change story.”