THE EFFECTS OF IMPERFECT SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL SAMPLING ON ESTIMATES OF THE GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURE - EXPERIMENTS WITH MODEL DATA

A long time series of data simulated by the NCAR Community Climate Mod el is used to empirically determine the effects of imperfect spatial a nd temporal sampling on estimates of the model's global-mean surface a ir temperature. Results determined from a simple statistical sampling equation and those determined from a simple Monte Carlo experiment are shown to be reasonably similar to the empirically determined ones. Th e results provide insights into the spatial sampling problem, and it i s proposed that variations of the simple models can be used in studies of real data to arrive at reasonable estimates of error that are dire ctly applicable to the actual global-mean surface temperature.