Reconciling Observations of Global Temperature Change (2000) / Chapter Skim
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6 Surface Temperature Observations
6 Surface Temperature Observations
Pages 32-40
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From page 32... ...
. The fact that a centennial-scale warming trend with similar decadal-scale features exists in both independently collected data sets serves as a useful check on the reality of the surface temperature trend.
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From page 33... ...
(1999) employed a different approach, combining land and ocean in situ data in the same "ridded data set, with interpolation into blank grid boxes with at least four neighbors, and then areally averaging the grid boxes into a single time series.
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From page 34... ...
All three of these very different approaches yielcl quite similar results (see Figure 6.3~. The exact value of the trend in globally averaged temperatures depends not only on which of these methods are used to globally average the data, but also on the time period assessed, as well as on the technique that is used to determine the linear trend.
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From page 35... ...
(1999) data set; the black line represents the Jones et al.
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From page 36... ...
have been the warmest decade on record. Considerable corroborating evidence exists to support the analyses indicating that global surface temperature has risen during this period of historical instrumental record.
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From page 37... ...
For example' starting only in 197S, a limited number of drifting buoys have been placed in the tropical and southern oceans where whaling fleets once took observations. While surface station coverage increased during the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, the difficulties in near-real time international data exchange and the success of many retrospective data gathering efforts (e.g., Bradley et al., 1985; Peterson
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From page 38... ...
By assessing the variability within 2° longitude by 2° latitude boxes within each month for 1979, they found that individual SST measurements are representative of the monthly mean to within a standard error of +1.0 °C in the tropics and +1.2 to 1.4 °C outside the tropics. The standard error is larger in the North Pacific than in the North Atlantic and it is much larger in regions of strong SST gradient, such as in the vicinity of the Gulf Stream, because both within-month temporal variability and the within-2° box spatial variability are enhanced.
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From page 39... ...
The possibility, indeed probability, of erroneous data is addressed by every major data set compiler as part of the quality control effort (e.g., Jones et al., 1999; Peterson et al., l998c)
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From page 40... ...
(1997) estimated that the typical standard errors for annual data on the interannual time scale since 1951 are about +0.06 oc.~3 Errors associated with century-scale surface temperature trends are probably an order of magnitude smaller than the observed warming of about 0.5 °C per 100 years since the late nineteenth century (Karl et al., 1994~.
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