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Implementing Full Spatial Coverage in NOAA’s Global Temperature Analysis
Author(s) -
Vose R. S.,
Huang B.,
Yin X.,
Arndt D.,
Easterling D. R.,
Lawrimore J. H.,
Menne M. J.,
SanchezLugo A.,
Zhang H. M.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2020gl090873
Subject(s) - environmental science , arctic , climatology , the arctic , global warming , trend analysis , meteorology , climate change , geography , computer science , oceanography , geology , machine learning
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintains an operational analysis for monitoring trends in global surface temperature. Because of limited polar coverage, the analysis does not fully capture the rapid warming in the Arctic over recent decades. Given the impact of coverage biases on trend assessments, we introduce a new analysis that is spatially complete for 1850–2018. The new analysis uses air temperature data in the Arctic Ocean and applies climate reanalysis fields in spatial interpolation. Both the operational analysis and the new analysis show statistically significant warming across the globe and the Arctic for all periods examined. The analyses have comparable global trends, but the new analysis exhibits significantly more warming in the Arctic since 1980 (0.598°C dec −1 vs. 0.478°C dec −1 ), and its trend falls outside the 95% confidence interval of its operational counterpart. Trend differences primarily result from coverage gaps in the operational analysis.