CANBERRA, June 1 (Xinhua) -- Australian scientists on Thursday said they have published "the most comprehensive" contribution of greenhouse gas data to worldwide climate change assessments, in a development which could soon lead to more accurate global climate simulations.
Researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) used data from a number of Australian weather stations - including the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's (BoM) Cape Grim station in northern Tasmania - to record high-quality, long-term observations of all 43 greenhouse gases which are released into the atmosphere as a by-product of human activity.
Researchers then combined that contemporary data with historical readings of greenhouse gas levels by using previous research involving measurements taken from air pockets frozen in Antarctic and Arctic ice.
The report's co-author, CSIRO research scientist Dr David Etheridge said in addition to being one of the most comprehensive reports on greenhouse gases, it was also one of Australia's largest contributions to climate change research.
"This continuous record over the last 2,000 years has been meticulously constructed by combining greenhouse gas measurements from dozens of laboratories around the world," Etheridge said in a statement on Thursday.
"We took data from contemporary and archived air samples, and from air trapped in ice bubbles in polar ice cores and compacted snow, also called firn."
He said the data pointed to a continuous rise in greenhouse gas levels since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
"(Our) observations clearly show the relentless and near-continuous rise of some of the most important greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide since 1750," he said.
Meanwhile, co-researcher, Dr Malte Meinshausen from the University of Melbourne said the published database could soon be used to create more accurate global climate models, painting a clearer picture about how climate change will affect Earth for years to come.
"Following the marathon of decades of efforts in Australia and around the world to collect and process all those data, our study was taking the last step of putting it all together into one coherent picture," Meinshausen said on Thursday.
