Over the past few weeks, there has been much discussion of global surface temperatures, as 2016 broke the previous 2015 record in all surface temperature series. Here I will place 2016 in context, highlighting the role of rapid Arctic warming in recent surface temperature evolution as seen in a comparison of four operational data sets. The 2016 increase over 2015 was much larger in the analyses that account for missing areas, especially the Arctic, providing additional impetus to address coverage bias among research groups that still have not done so. I’ll also take a quick look at the growing effect of residual biases from ship-buoy measurement adjustments in sea surface temperature (SST) analyses in recent years, which has led to some additional divergence between the two major operational SST series underlying these four global series.
Recent comments
Deep Climate 