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Data Sources |
ECV Products and Requirements |
Surface Temperature
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Surface air temperature has profound and widespread impacts on both natural systems and on human lives and activities. It affects health, agriculture, energy demand and much more. Extremes of surface air temperature, both heat waves and extreme cold periods, are particular important for human health. Surface air temperature provides a key indicator of climate change, contributing to the “global surface temperature record”. A goal of limiting changes in global surface temperature provides the measure for the Paris climate agreement. | |
| Domain: | Atmosphere | |
| Subdomain: | Surface | |
| Scientific Area: | Energy and Temperature | |
| ECV Steward: | Philip Jones, Elizabeth Kent | |
| ECV Product: | Temperature | |
Global Surface Air Temperature
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Figure: Estimates of average global surface temperature anomalies (degC with respect to the 1961–1990 mean) during the instrumental period (dots: median estimates; vertical bars: 95% uncertainty ranges) and decadally-smoothed values (graded shading from dark to light blue for values from the median to the outer 95% uncertainty) from HadCRUT4. Source: Tim Osborn (CRU, UEA) (Osborn, T.J., Jones, P.D. and Joshi, M., 2017: Recent United Kingdom and global temperature variations. Weather 72, 323-329, doi:10.1002/wea.3174., https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/~timo/diag/tempdiag.htm. Data source: HadCRUT4 data, Morice CP, Kennedy JJ, Rayner NA and Jones PD (2012) Quantifying uncertainties in global and regional temperature change using an ensemble of observational estimates: the HadCRUT4 dataset. Journal of Geophysical Research, 117, D08101, doi:10.1029/2011JD017187. |
