A new addition to the Climate Modeling Best Estimate (CBME) data set has been released, comprising a statistical summary of the CMBE data. It includes both monthly mean and monthly mean diurnal cycle and their climatologies for all the geophysical quantities contained in the CMBE data sets. The CMBE data set is specifically tailored for use in evaluating global climate models and includes long-term best estimates from selected ARM measurements for cloud fraction, total cloud cover, shortwave and longwave radiation fluxes, liquid water path, and precipitable water vapor.
The new summary data sets are designed to reduce uncertainty in data caused by gaps in the original CMBE data set. Due to missing gaps in the original CMBE data set, statistics generated from CMBE by different groups may be slightly different, depending on how they treat those missing data points. The summary data sets provide a best estimate of these statistics based on the original CMBE data. Significant quality control checks exclude the outliers suspected to be mainly due to missing data.
The data and description of CMBE data and the statistical summary files can be found at http://iop.archive.arm.gov/arm-iop/0showcase-data/cmbe/cmbe-statistical-summary/, and the details and plots can be found on the CMBE web page at http://science.arm.gov/wg/cpm/scm/cmbe_stat_summary.html.
An article in the January 2010 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society serves as the main reference for the CMBE data:
Xie, S, RB McCoy, SA Klein, RT Cederwall, WJ Wiscombe, EE Clothiaux, KL Gaustad, JC Golaz, SD Hall, MP Jensen, KL Johnson, Y Lin, CN Long, JH Mather, RA McCord, SA McFarlane, G Palanisamy, Y Shi, and DD Turner. 2010. “ARM Climate Modeling Best Estimate data: a new data product for climate studies.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 91: 13–20, doi: 10.1175/2009BAMS2891.1.
More information about this data set is available on the CBME web page. To access these data, log in to the Data Archive. (Go here to request an account.)