Creating and maintaining a record of surface temperatures around the world isn’t as easy as it sounds, even if you rightly don’t think that sounds easy. Lots of work goes into combining different kinds of measurements in the most accurate way possible. When new studies provide slightly better accounting for some of the complications involved, the records need to get updated.
An update to the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s temperature record is out this week, and the researchers behind it say it has an impact on discussions about the slower rise of global average surface temperatures in recent years. That is, it doesn’t look much slower.
In this case, the update was spurred by two efforts. The first was simply a new database of weather stations on land that more than doubles the number available by folding in many smaller collections. The second was research into sources of sea surface temperature measurements. A large number of buoys are now dedicated to making these measurements, but commercial ships have also been a major source of data. Those ships haven’t always used the same methods, though, so researchers have to be careful to account for differences between the data those methods produce.
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