Archiving Data No Fun

Jeff Id at The Air Vent looks at: The state of climate temperature data.

Bart Verheggan left a comment on the recent global land temperature thread which supports Eric Steig’s comment, that one of the reasons scientists don’t have good surface temperature data, is because it’s unglamorous.

Eric Steig made some very insightful comments here. I have the same experience as he describes:

• monitoring and data archiving is deemed uninteresting by most scientists
• it’s difficult to get it funded by the regular scientific funding channels.

Part of the problem lies with how scientific work is valued: Largely by the quantity of papers. Monitoring and data archiving are therefore a very poor investment in the way science is currently set up.