This CPO-supported dataset has resulted in new ways in which the community can examine low frequency climate and it is now in a reliable public data repository for years to come.

The product will help scientists identify whether an extreme heat event tomorrow is significant or actually “extreme” relative to the historical record. It may also help assess extreme heat impacts on sectors like agriculture, health, and energy.

Record cold and record warm temperatures across the planet can cause major and widespread impacts to life and property. But how frequent are these extreme temperature events? How do the frequencies of record warm events and record cold events compare, and have their relative frequencies changed over time? A new product funded by CPO's Climate Observations and Monitoring Program helps answers these questions.

This month, a research team, funded in part by CPO's Climate Observations and Monitoring Program and Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections Program, published an update to a weather “time machine” they’ve been developing since 2011. This third version of the 20th Century Reanalysis Project, or 20CRv3 for short, is a dauntingly complex, high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was for every day back to 1836.

Our planet has been baking under the sun this summer as temperatures reached the hottest ever recorded and heat waves spread across the globe. While the climate continues to warm, scientists expect the frequency and intensity of heat waves to increase. However, a commonly overlooked aspect is the spatial size of heat waves, despite its important implications.