In response to the ‘Climategate‘ controversy (direct or otherwise) where a server that constructs various global temperature and precipitation analyses was breached at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project aims to resolve current criticism of former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions. Their results will include not only best estimate for the global temperature change, but estimates of the uncertainties in the record.

The objectives of the project are:

1. To merge existing surface station temperature data sets into a new comprehensive raw data set with a common format that could be used for weather and climate research
2. To review existing temperature processing algorithms for averaging, homogenization, and error analysis to understand both their advantages and their limitations
3. To develop new approaches and alternative statistical methods that may be able to effectively remove some of the limitations present in existing algorithms
4. To create and publish a new global surface temperature record and associated uncertainty analysis
5. To provide an open platform for further analysis by publishing our complete data and software code as well as tools to aid both professional and amateur exploration of the data

For further information visit: http://www.berkeleyearth.org/