Late 19th century navigational uncertainties and their influence on sea surface temperature estimates

DOI10.1214/20-AOAS1367zbMATH Open1475.62275arXiv1910.04843OpenAlexW3137645910MaRDI QIDQ2233129FDOQ2233129

Authors: Chenguang Dai, Duo Chan, Peter Huybers, Natesh S. Pillai 

Publication date: 14 October 2021

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Accurate estimates of historical changes in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and their uncertainties are important for documenting and understanding historical changes in climate. A source of uncertainty that has not previously been quantified in historical SST estimates stems from position errors. A Bayesian inference framework is proposed for quantifying errors in reported positions and their implications on SST estimates. The analysis framework is applied to data from the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS3.0) in 1885, a time when astronomical and chronometer estimation of position was common, but predating the use of radio signals. Focus is upon a subset of 943 ship tracks from ICOADS3.0 that report their position every two hours to a precision of 0.01{deg} longitude and latitude. These data are interpreted as positions determined by dead reckoning that are periodically updated by celestial correction techniques. The posterior medians of uncertainties in celestial correction are 33.1 km (0.30{deg} on the equator) in longitude and 24.4 km (0.22{deg}) in latitude, respectively. The posterior medians of two-hourly dead reckoning uncertainties are 19.2% for ship speed and 13.2{deg} for ship heading, leading to random position uncertainties with median 0.18{deg} (20 km on the equator) in longitude and 0.15{deg} (17 km) in latitude. Reported ship tracks also contain systematic position uncertainties relating to precursor dead-reckoning positions not being updated after obtaining celestial position estimates, indicating that more accurate positions can be provided for SST observations. Finally, we translate position errors into SST uncertainties by sampling an ensemble of SSTs from the Multi-scale Ultra-high resolution Sea Surface Temperature (MURSST) data set.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.04843

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zbMATH Keywords

state-space modelhierarchical modelnavigational uncertaintyposition errorsea surface temperature uncertainty

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Inference from spatial processes (62M30) Estimation in multivariate analysis (62H12) Applications of statistics to environmental and related topics (62P12) Hydrology, hydrography, oceanography (86A05)

Cited In (1)

• A combined estimate of global temperature

Uses Software

• RStan
• rstan

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