Today a new set of fundamental holdings of
land surface air temperature records stretching back deep into the 19th Century has been released as a result of several years of effort by a multinational group of scientists.
Not exact matches
What we think of as the modern
temperature record is made up of many thousands of measurements from the
air above
land and the ocean
surface, collected by ships, buoys and sometimes satellites, too.
They avoid some of the issues in Millar by using more globally - representative
surface temperature records, though they still use series that blend
surface air temperatures over
land with slower - warming sea
surface temperatures over the ocean.
According to NOAA's 2016 Arctic Report Card, the average annual
surface air temperature anomaly (+3.6 °F / 2.0 °C relative to the 1981 - 2010 baseline) over
land north of 60 ° N between October 2015 and September 2016 was by far the highest in the observational
record beginning in 1900.
Average
air temperature over the
land and sea
surface was 0.56 degrees Celsius above the long - term average, tied with 2010 as the joint warmest year on
record.
To clarify,
land temperature anomalies are
recorded as
surface air temperature, but ocean
temperature records are a more complex function that I believe also incorporates data from the water
surface itself.
There is even a slightly finer distinction that is almost always skipped: when it comes to the
land record, we're talking about global
surface air temperature.
Blue points: the GISS 1999
land + sea global
surface air temperature record.
The single highest
land surface temperature (LST)
recorded in any year, in any region, occurred there in 2005, when MODIS
recorded a
temperature of 70.7 °C (159.3 °F)- more than 12 °C (22 °F) warmer than the official
air temperature record from Libya.
Jones and Moberg (2003) revised and updated the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) monthly
land -
surface air temperature record, improving coverage particularly in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) in the late 19th century.