As the pace of warming has shot up, politicians have responded in part by casting doubt on the global temperature data. They've argued we should ignore surface datasets and pay attention to satellite measurements of the upper atmosphere, which just happen to show a little less warming in recent years. The work that goes into maintaining all of these datasets is pretty complex—enough so that we recently dedicated about 5,000 words to the subject.
One of the people we talked to for that story was Carl Mears, who helps run one of the major satellite datasets of upper air temperatures. Mears explained the calibrations and corrections that go into that dataset and frankly discussed the uncertainties surrounding it. Overall, he felt that the uncertainties of the satellites' data were greater than those for surface datasets like those run by NASA and the UK Met Office.
Building on analysis of that uncertainty, Mears and his colleague Frank Wentz have published a paper describing an update to their dataset—one that ends up increasing the warming trend significantly.
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