The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) have recently released an update of their reanalysis temperature record. This record is a construction of surface temperature utilizing a range of sources including surface temperature measurements, satellite data, radiosondes, ships and buoys. The new results find that the average temperature over land areas of the extratropical northern hemisphere reached a new high in July 2010.
Figure 1: Anomalies in the mean two-metre temperature for May, June and July (deg C), averaged over all land areas north of 20N. Anomalies are relative to the period 1989-2001.
Probably of more interest to most is the global temperature record. The advantage of the ECMWF is it utilises it's variety of data sources to pull together a global record of surface temperature. This enables them to include regions such as the Arctic where warming is most pronounced. The global average over the 12 months to June 2010 ranks as the second highest on record, insignificantly smaller than the average for the calendar year of 2005.
Figure 2: 12-month running average of global-mean two-metre temperature anomalies (K) relative to the period 1989-2001. Shading is used to indicate an uncertainty range of ±0.1K.
Posted by John Cook on Monday, 13 September, 2010
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