Md. Producing a trustworthy climate documentary is no easy task, as balloon readings are indirect. Similarly, NASA relies on satellite instruments for global coverage detecting various types of radiant energy. Indirect means imperfect, so scientists have to worry about errors when combining observations with forecast models. NASA HPCC is helping the Office find better ways of dealing with errors as the number of observations increase and models get more complex. Lessons learned serve their mission to provide climate data sets to the international research community.
Every instrument has a percentage error that is estimated from observation comparisons.
You give more weight to the more accurate instrument. NASA HPCC allows prototyping of new computational approaches. In weighing errors on a global scale, the Office's guide is engineer Rudolf Kalman. While difficult enough, navigation involves pinning down only position and velocity. Balloons, satellites, surface instruments, ships and aircraft make over 400,000 observations a day.