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Global-average temperature data released

News Release issued by the COI News Distribution Service on 08 December 2009

The Met Office has today released station temperature records for over one and a half thousand of the stations that make up the global land surface temperature record.

This data is a subset of the full HadCRUT record of global temperatures, which is one of the global temperature records that have underpinned IPCC assessment reports and numerous scientific studies. The data subset consists of a network of individual stations that has been designated by the World Meteorological Organisation for use in climate monitoring. The subset of stations is evenly distributed across the globe and provides a fair representation of changes in mean temperature on a global scale over land.

This subset is not a new global temperature record and it does not replace the HadCRUT, NASA GISS and NCDC global temperature records, all of which have been fully peer reviewed. This subset shows that global average land temperatures have risen over the last 150 years and is very similar to the temperature rises shown by the complete dataset.

This subset release will continue the policy of putting as much of the station temperature record as possible into the public domain. As soon as we have all permissions in place we will release the remaining station records - around 5000 in total - that make up the full land temperature record. We are dependant on international approvals to enable this final step and cannot guarantee that we will get permission from all data owners.

We intend that as soon as possible we will also publish the specific computer code that aggregates the individual station temperatures into the global land temperature record.

UEA fully supports the Met Office in making this data publicly available and is continuing to work with the Met Office to seek the necessary permission from national data owners to publish, as soon as possible as much of the data that we can gain permission for.

The data is available from the following web page:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html

More information on the construction of global-average temperature records can be found at:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/explained/explained5.html

Contacts:

Press Office
Phone: 01392 886655
pressoffice@metoffice.gov.uk