Connotea
CiteULike
del.ico.us
BibSonomyAbstract
Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends
University of Colorado, CIRES/ATOC, Boulder, Colorado, USA
Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada, USA
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
Department of Agronomy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
Department of Agronomy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
Department of Agronomy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA
School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA
Department of Meteorology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA
Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA
Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR), National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), NOAA, Camp Springs, Maryland, USA
CIRA, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
Department of Geography and Geology, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA
Department of Geography and Geology, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA
Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, Alabama, USA
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA
This paper documents various unresolved issues in using surface temperature trends as a metric for assessing global and regional climate change. A series of examples ranging from errors caused by temperature measurements at a monitoring station to the undocumented biases in the regionally and globally averaged time series are provided. The issues are poorly understood or documented and relate to micrometeorological impacts due to warm bias in nighttime minimum temperatures, poor siting of the instrumentation, effect of winds as well as surface atmospheric water vapor content on temperature trends, the quantification of uncertainties in the homogenization of surface temperature data, and the influence of land use/land cover (LULC) change on surface temperature trends. Because of the issues presented in this paper related to the analysis of multidecadal surface temperature we recommend that greater, more complete documentation and quantification of these issues be required for all observation stations that are intended to be used in such assessments. This is necessary for confidence in the actual observations of surface temperature variability and long-term trends.
Received 7 November 2006; accepted 14 May 2007; published 29 December 2007.
Citation: (2007), Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229.
Cited By