CORRESPONDENCE
WITH U.S. NSF 
Dec. 15, 2003
Dear
Mr. McIntyre,
I
contacted Dr. Mann regarding your request for his data. I also contacted
the NSF Office of General Counsel. In my judgment, the researchers (please
see Dr. Mann's electronic message below) have satisfied NSF's desire to see the
results of publicly funded research made available to the wider science
community.
The NSF relies on the mores of the scientific and engineering research and
education community when conducting research and releasing data. The
investigators come to the NSF with creative ideas to address difficult
scientific questions and we give them the freedom to pursue those ideas and
follow their line of research, wherever it leads them. In return, we
expect them to make their data available so that other scientists may examine
and replicate their findings.
Dr. Mann and his colleagues have good records of responding to the needs of the
wider scientific community by publishing their results and ideas in the
peer-reviewed literature and making their data available in publicly accessible
databases. I believe that their most recent efforts follow in that
tradition.
Respectfully,
David J. Verardo
Director, Paleoclimate Program
Division of Atmospheric Sciences (Room 775)
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Blvd.
Arlington, VA 22203
phone: 703-292-8527
fax: 703-292-9023
email: dverardo@nsf.gov
http://www.nsf.gov
ATTACHMENT
At
11:31 AM 12/5/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Dear Mike,
With regards to the recent request made by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick
for access to data that you and your colleagues used in a series of
peer-reviewed publications, please let me how and when you are planning to
release the data relevant to their request.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Dave
David J. Verardo
Director, Paleoclimate Program
Division of Atmospheric Sciences (Room 775)
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Blvd.
Arlington, VA 22203
phone: 703-292-8527
fax: 703-292-9023
email: dverardo@nsf.gov
<http://www.nsf.gov/>
-----Original
Message-----
From: Michael E. Mann [mailto:mann@virginia.edu]
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 1:39 PM
To: Verardo, David J.
Cc: mann@virginia.edu1
Subject: Re: data access
Dear Dave,
Thanks for your inquiry.
As we encourage any good-faith attempts by other scientists to repeat our
analysis, we have indeed already made the data associated with our NSF-funded
research which includes the Mann et al, 1998 Nature article ('MBH98'); Mann et
al, 1999 GRL article ('MBH99'), and Mann et al, 2000 Earth Interactions article,
available publicly.
All of the time series data shown in MBH98 (the hemispheric temperature
reconstruction and uncertainties, the reconstructed principal components "RPC"
series, etc) were made available both on this website: <http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mem6u/mbh98.html>
and through the NOAA paleo data site: <http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann1998/frames.htm>
at the time of publication.
All data (proxy indicators used and the reconstructions and uncertainties)
associated with MBH99 were made available at the time of publication, here: <http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mem6u/mbh99.html>
as well as here:
<ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/contributions_by_author/mann1999/>
We then made the detailed yearly spatial reconstructions available in 2000 at
the NOAA paleo website:
<http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ei/ei_cover.html>
From the time of publication of MBH98, a listing of all of the proxy data (with
some minor typos) was provided here:
<ftp://eclogite.geo.umass.edu/pub/mann/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/MultiProxy/data-supp.html>
while details of the number of proxy indicators used in the stepwise
reconstruction approach were provided here:
<ftp://eclogite.geo.umass.edu/pub/mann/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/MultiProxy/stats-supp.html>
and the instrumental temperature data, including eigenvectors and eigenvalues,
and instrumental series shown in the various figures, were provided here:
<ftp://eclogite.geo.umass.edu/pub/mann/MANNETAL98/>
All of the proxy data used in MBH98 were made available on our public ftp site
once the various researchers that contributed data to our network were able to
publish their own data (July 2002). The data (all individual proxy indicators
used as well as the various PC representations of proxy sub networks for
different time intervals) were provided in the various clearly labeled
directories here:
<ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/MBH98/>
We provided extensive documentation of the data sets used in the supplementary
information lodged at Nature's web site in association with the publication of
MBH98, so that those wishing to repeat our analyses could either go to the same
public domain sources as us, or approach the colleagues who had kindly made data
available to us. We made considerable efforts to make the various data and
numerical results readily available online as soon as we were free to do so (in
2002), by setting up the public ftp site referred to above, although we were
under no known obligation to provide the data in that particular medium. We gave
as detailed a description of our methods as was possible in the confines of a
short paper, and in all these respects must have satisfied the stringent
standards set by the editor and reviewers of the journal in which we published.
In order to facilitate any attempt to reproduce our results we are now taking a
further step beyond those normally required in the publication of such research.
We are working with Nature to provide the MBH98 proxy data set in a more
transparent, user-friendly format than that set up in 2002, including additional
documentation, fixing of minor typos in the descriptions of different datasets,
and providing some additional minor methodological details of the MBH98
analysis. We are also providing the full raw instrumental University of East
Anglia/Climatic Research Unit surface temperature dataset 1854-1993 (Briffa and
Jones, 1992), because CRU has since updated their surface temperature dataset,
and no longer archives the version that we used when we began our study in the
mid 1990s.
Please let me know if there is any additional information I can provide you that
would be of help in this matter. I will of course update you once we/Nature have
released the revised data archive.
Best regards,
mike
Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
_______________________________________________________________________
e-mail: mann@virginia.edu Phone: (434)
924-7770 FAX: (434) 982-2137
<http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml>