I have a #science question. A major challenge in #climatology and climate models is reconstructing historical weather and climate data from incomplete and fragmentary data sets and many different sources. I know that there is a lot of thought put into these models, and that they largely do it well. But to outsiders, this process of reconstruction can often seem dubious and thus is frequently used to cased doubt against both these reconstructions and the field of climatology as a whole.
So what I could use for such discussions are other examples of mathematical reconstructions of historical datasets from fields _outside_ of climatology, to show that this is not a unique process but a widely used approach. Can anyone give me any suggestions?