New profile: global temperature datasets
- 11 Mar 2011, 14:08
- The Carbon Brief
There are four principal global temperature datasets. Three use
surface temperature measurements taken at land and sea, and record
a clear warming trend over the past century. One is collected by
the Met Office Hadley Centre jointly with the Climatic Research
Unit (HadCRU) in the United Kingdom. Two datasets are collected by
organisations in the United States: the NASA's Goddard Institute of
Space Studies (GISS) and NOAA's National Climatic Data Center
(NCDC).
The final dataset uses satellites to measure the troposphere -
the lower part of the Earth's Atmosphere. It is collected by the
University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), started in 1978, and
also records a clear warming trend.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) of the
United Nations uses the datasets kept by GISS, NCDC and HadCRU to
calculate a single world average. These datasets are also quoted in
the IPCC's
Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).
Read more about global temperature datasets in our full
profile.