| Reproducible science and open minds: case studies from climatology |
| Manfred Mudelsee |
| Climate Risk Analysis and Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany |
| Climatologists, and other applied researchers, analyse data by means of statistical methods and obtain some results. Open-access data and fully documented methods allow others to reproduce the results. This makes the data, methods and results criticizable, which is the basis for progress. This is Karl Popper's logic of scientific discovery. It is more relevant than ever. Data and methods may come from different disciplines, such as astronomy, Earth sciences, historical science, physics, mathematics or statistics. Therefore I find it helpful to look beyond the boundaries of the disciplines learned at school or university. These concepts are illustrated in two case studies. One is on floods of the river Elbe over the past millennium (Mudelsee et al. 2003, Nature 425, 166). The other study is on heatwave indices and comes from ongoing work. |