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Title: Independent confirmation of global land warming without the use of station temperatures

Journal Article · · Geophysical Research Letters
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/grl.50425· OSTI ID:1564929
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [1]
  1. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States). Cooperative Inst. for Research in Environmental Sciences; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO (United States). Earth System Research Lab.
  2. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO (United States). Earth System Research Lab.
  3. Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter (United Kingdom)
  4. Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich (United Kingdom); King Abdulaziz Univ., Jeddah (Saudi Arabia)
+ Show Author Affiliations

Confidence in estimates of anthropogenic climate change is limited by known issues with air temperature observations from land stations. Station siting, instrument changes, changing observing practices, urban effects, land cover, land use variations, and statistical processing have all been hypothesized as affecting the trends presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others. Any artifacts in the observed decadal and centennial variations associated with these issues could have important consequences for scientific understanding and climate policy. We use a completely different approach to investigate global land warming over the 20th century. We have ignored all air temperature observations and instead inferred them from observations of barometric pressure, sea surface temperature, and sea-ice concentration using a physically based data assimilation system called the 20th Century Reanalysis. This independent data set reproduces both annual variations and centennial trends in the temperature data sets, demonstrating the robustness of previous conclusions regarding global warming.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF); Univ. of California, Oakland, CA (United States); UT-Battelle LLC/ORNL, Oak Ridge, TN (United States); UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231; AC05-00OR22725; SC0005689
OSTI ID:
1564929
Journal Information:
Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 40, Issue 12; ISSN 0094-8276
Publisher:
American Geophysical UnionCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 37 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (12)

Estimating low-frequency variability and trends in atmospheric temperature using ERA-Interim: Atmospheric Temperature Variability and Trends using ERA-Interim journal January 2014
ERA-20CM: a twentieth-century atmospheric model ensemble: The ERA-20CM Ensemble
  • Hersbach, Hans; Peubey, Carole; Simmons, Adrian
  • Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Vol. 141, Issue 691 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.2528
journal March 2015
Towards a more reliable historical reanalysis: Improvements for version 3 of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis system
  • Slivinski, Laura C.; Compo, Gilbert P.; Whitaker, Jeffrey S.
  • Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Vol. 145, Issue 724 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3598
journal August 2019
Consistency of extreme temperature changes in China under a historical half-degree warming increment across different reanalysis and observational datasets journal January 2020
Temperature trends in Europe: comparison of different data sources journal December 2019
Influence of high-latitude warming and land-use changes in the early 20th century northern Eurasian CO 2 sink journal June 2018
On the Suitability of Current Atmospheric Reanalyses for Regional Warming Studies over China posted_content December 2017
Ensemble cloud-resolving modelling of a historic back-building mesoscale convective system over Liguria: the San Fruttuoso case of 1915 journal January 2017
Evaluation of Greenland near surface air temperature datasets journal January 2017
On the suitability of current atmospheric reanalyses for regional warming studies over China journal January 2018
Ensemble cloud-resolving modelling of a historic back-building mesoscale convective system over Liguria: The San Fruttuoso case of 1915 journal October 2016
Towards a more reliable historical reanalysis: Improvements for version 3 of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis system text January 2019

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