An observational record of global near surface air temperature change over land and ocean from 1781 to present

Abstract

<p>We present a new data set of air temperature change across land and ocean extending back to the late-18<sup>th</sup> century. This new data set uses marine air temperature observations rather than the sea surface temperature measurements typically used by pre-existing data sets. This allows the new data set to extend further into the past than existing instrumental temperature records, which typically have start dates in the mid-to-late 19<sup>th</sup> century. The new data set brings together advances in understanding of measurement biases affecting all-day marine air temperature observations with a new assessment of the effects of non-standard thermometer enclosures used at land meteorological stations in the early instrumental record. A further innovation is the use of kriging to obtain localised temperature estimates that allow land air temperature records to be converted into anomalies even for stations without observations during the baseline period. Global and hemispheric series show close agreement with those based on sea-surface temperature for much of the overlapping period of their records, some of the interesting differences will be presented. This data set has been developed under the GloSAT project (https://www.glosat.org/).</p>