Assessing Recent Warming Using Instrumentally-Homogeneous Sea Surface Temperature Records

Zeke Hausfather, Kevin Cowtan, David Clarke, Peter Jacobs, Mark Richardson, Robert Rohde

Overview

In a paper published in Science Advances, we used data from buoys, satellites, and Argo floats to construct separate instrumentally homogenous sea surface temperature records of the past two decades. We compared them to the old NOAA ERSSTv3b record, the new ERSSTv4 record, the Hadley Centre’s HadSST3 record, and the Japanese COBE-SST record. We found a strong and significant cool bias in the old NOAA record, and a more modest (but still significant) cool bias in the Hadley and Japanese records compared to buoy, satellite, and Argo float data. The new NOAA record agrees quite well with these instrumentally homogenous records. This suggests that the new NOAA record is likely the most accurate sea surface temperature record in recent years, and should help resolve some of the criticism that accompanied the original NOAA study.


This web site provides material relating to the paper "Assessing Recent Warming Using Instrumentally-Homogeneous Sea Surface Temperature Records", published in Science Advances.

If you would like to access the data and methods from the paper, follow the Methods and data link.