Climate Scientist Starter Kit v2.0 Coming

Behind these scenes I've been working on an update to the Climate Scientist Starter Kit. The new version will be 2.0. It's still a ways off, but I wanted to do a series of articles about some of the new things it'll contain. In this post, we'll look at three new datasets that will be added: Length Of Day Delta and the Solar and Lunar Ephemeris.

Length Of Day Delta (LODD)

I've made a couple of posts already about the Length of Day Delta (LODD) (see here and here). The LODD tells us how many more milliseconds are added to the average length of day of 86,400 seconds each day.

It turns out that the LODD has some interesting correlations to several more common climate factors, including the global amount of Earth's water vapor. It's possible that by learning more about what causes changes in the LODD, we'll learn more about what causes changes in these other climate factors.

The LODD data comes from The Earth Orientation Centre. Below is a graph of the LODD data that will appear In the new Climate Scientist Starter Kit. It shows monthly LODD data from January, 1962 through December, 2009 with a 13 month running mean added.

Solar And Lunar Ephemeris

The solar and lunar ephemeris data gives the location of the sun and moon in relationship to the Earth. It's well known that lunar ephemeris data is closely related to Earth's tides. Solar ephemeris data  has a 12 month cycle that corresponds to cycles that appear repeatedly in climate data.

Both sets of data provide data from January, 1900 to December, 2009. The data is obtained from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The graph below shows solar ephemeris data from January, 1980 through December, 2009.

Normalized Data Included
One of the nice things about the Climate Scientist Starter kit is that it includes versions of most of the data that have been normalized to a range of zero to one. This makes it easy to compare data from very different data sets. The new data being added to version 2.0 continues this tradition. The graph below shows monthly LODD data mapped together with solar ephemeris data using the normalized version of both data sets.

More To Come
There are many more types of data being added to version 2.0 of the Climate Scientist Starter Kit. We'll cover those in future posts. If there's something you'd like added, leave a note in the comments and I will do my best to add it.

References:
Climate Scientist Starter Kit
Stunning New Climate Correlation
More On Water Vapor, Length Of Day Delta Correlation
The Earth Orientation Centre
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory