Using model projections to study the emergence of observable climate signals presumes omniscient knowledge about the climate system. In reality, observational knowledge suffers from data quality and availability issues, for instance data gaps, changes in instrumentation, issues due to gridding and retrieval algorithms. Overlooking such deficiencies leads to misrepresentations of the time of emergence (ToE). We introduce a new definition of ToE that accounts for observational limitations, and show that significant corrections to the ToE may be necessary to achieve the same statistical confidence as would be afforded by omniscient knowledge. We also show how our method can inform future observational needs and observing systems design.

中文翻译：

---

气候信号出现的观测局限性


使用模型预测来研究可观测气候信号的出现需要对气候系统有无所不知的了解。实际上，观测知识受到数据质量和可用性问题的影响，例如数据差距、仪器变化、网格和检索算法引起的问题。忽视这些缺陷会导致对出现时间 (ToE) 的错误表述。我们引入了 ToE 的新定义，该定义考虑了观察的局限性，并表明可能需要对 ToE 进行重大修正才能获得与全知知识所提供的相同的统计置信度。我们还展示了我们的方法如何为未来的观测需求和观测系统设计提供信息。