ACRE Southeast Asia

Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) Southeast Asia

The primary goal of this regional foci is to build both capabilities and capacities within Southeast Asian institutions, agencies and National Meteorological Services to improve and extend historical instrumental, documentary and palaeo databases of SE Asian weather/climate, in order to contribute to the generation of high-quality, high-resolution historical weather reconstructions (reanalyses). These new baselines will allow scientists and policy makers across the region to address weather/climate extremes, impacts and risks in ways and over time spans not previously possible. These aims will be achieved by establishing a regional arm of the international Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative: ACRE Southeast Asia to serve as a body to facilitate the search for, and recovery of, historic weather observations in the region.  

Rationale:

• ACRE’s primary goal is to build the capacity to recover image, digitise, quality control, store and make available publically historical instrumental and documentary weather observations from across the globe. In particular, it seeks to develop regional data rescue foci in parts of the world where known data are currently sparse, difficult to recover or obtain. Southeast Asia is one such region where, due to a variety of political, historic, economic, and environmental reasons, pre 1950s data are lacking in any coherent form. 

• Dynamical downscaling, such as by the PRECIS team models (based at the UK’s Hadley Centre), will then be enabled to take the reanalyses output (historical dynamical global 3D weather reanalyses output – the ACRE-facilitated 20th Century Reanalysis project [20CR] has 56 realisations of all global 3D variable fields every 6 hours) down to finer resolution (eg. 25 to 12 km). The resultant model outputs will be made available for use by the climate science community, climate services, policy makers, planners, environmental managers, educational institutions and the public across Southeast Asia. 

Process:

Led by an international team of historians, scientists and policy makers, ACRE Southeast Asia will work with National Meteorological Services, archives and academic institutions in the region to raise awareness of the value of long-term observational data, uncover disparate historical weather observations and build a database of all such information. The aim is that, with cataloguing, imaging and digitization, data currently in danger of being lost, or being left hidden, can be built into assessable new, longer data series, spatial weather reconstructions and reanalysis baselines, allowing for vast improvements in current and future projections of weather and climate extremes and risks, including typhoons, heat waves, flooding, and droughts over time spans not previously possible. 

Current Activity: 

Over the past two years, ACRE SEA has linked with the meteorological services of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, Macau, Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia. In some of these countries, archival research has also been undertaken in order to uncover previously unknown sources of pre-1950s weather data. As part of this effort, the team has been working with universities and other institutions in external countries with previously colonial governments (e.g. France, Portugal, Britain, Japan) to explore extant weather observations not currently held at Southeast Asian meteorological services. ACRE SEA is actively seeking funds for the digitisation of such data where it exists. 

ACRE SEA was represented at the ACRE-China Workshop 23-25 August 2016, Beijing. This workshop is hosted by the National Climate Centre (NCC/BCC) of China Meteorological Administration (CMA) and School of Environmental Science of China University of Geosciences (CUG).

ACRE SEA will also be represented at linked workshops at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum (HKMM) on the theme of historic (extreme) weather and meteorology and the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) with the ACRE-China 2 meeting during the period from the 1-3 March 2017.  These workshops are being organised by H.Y. Mok (HKO), Fiona Williamson (NUS/ACRE SE Asia/ACRE China), Rob Allan (UKMO/ACRE/ACRE China) and Guoyu Ren (CMA/ACRE China).

Support:

Between 2015-2018, ACRE SEA receives support as part of WP1 within the Climate Science for Service Partnership China (CSSP China). This funding enable continued research into potential sources of regional weather observations and awareness raising activities. 

From 2013-15, we were supported by a two-year funding award from the Asia Pacific Network Global Change Research CAPaBLE Programme (http://www.apn-gcr.org/), for the project: ACRE SE Asia– towards new weather and climate baselines for assessing weather and climate extremes, impacts and risks over SE Asia (CBA2013-03NMY_D' Arrigo). This funding enabled ACRE SEA to hold a regional workshop (27-8 May 2014), to engage with NMHS in the region, and to undertake archival research in several countries in the Southeast Asian region. See:  Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research (http://www.apn-gcr.org/)

Core Project Team:

Dr Fiona Williamson, National University of Singapore (NUS); United Nations University-International Institute of Global Health (UNU-IIGH)

fionawilliamson76@gmail.com 

ACRE SE Asia Links:

Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research http://www.apn-gcr.org/

WMO/ACRE/GFCS INdian Ocean DAta REscue (INDARE) http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/wcdmp/INDARE_SC.php

The International Data Rescue (I-DARE) Portal https://idare-portal.org

Tree-Ring Laboratory, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/tree-ring-laboratory

KNMI-BMKG Digitisasi Data Historis (DiDaH)  http://www.didah.org/

Southeast Asian Climate Assessment and Dataset (SACA&D) portal http://saca-bmkg.knmi.nl/

Publications

Williamson, F., Allan, R., Switzer, A.D., Chan, J.C.L., Wasson, R.J.,  D'Arrigo, R.,  and  Gartner, R.,  2015:  New Directions in Hydro-Climatic Histories: Observational Data Recovery, Proxy Records and the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative in Southeast Asia.  Geoscience Letters, 2:2, http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2Fs40562-015-0018-z.pdf   DOI 10.1186/s40562-015-0018-z.

Williamson, F., Guoyu Ren   and   Allan, R., 2016:  The Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative ACRE China workshop: Recovery, Digitization and Analysis of Pre-mid-20th Century Climate Observational Data in East Asia workshop 23-24th August, Beijing, China.  Earth and Space Science, DOI: 10.1002/2016EA000215.