Introduction
Surface temperatures in most parts of the world have risen since the beginning of the 20th century. The increases have been observed through measurements taken at thousands of land surface stations and on ocean surfaces by ships, buoys, floats, and in the past 25 to 30 years by satellites. Although surface temperature measurements are not the only indicators that the Earth has warmed*, this record provides important information on the rate of change and the variability that has occurred during the past century. Included on this page are time series of global and hemispheric mean temperature time series and maps of the spatial distribution and magnitude of temperature trends during two periods, 1901-2003 and 1979-2003. The trend maps are provided on annual and seasonal time scales.
The time series were produced using the method described in Quayle et al. (1999), while the spatial trend maps were produced using the GHCN-ERSST blended dataset of land and ocean temperatures (Smith and Reynolds, 2005).
*The observed temperature increases have been accompanied by other phenomena such as decreases in mountain glacier extent and snow cover, shortening seasons of lake and river ice, decreases in Arctic sea-ice extent, and a rise in global average sea level (IPCC, 2001).
Global time series
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Although yearly and decadal variations are evident in these time series of annual global surface mean temperatures, the 1901-2004 long-term trend in combined land and ocean temperatures is positive (+0.6°C/century). Land surface temperatures have increased at a rate of +0.8°C/century while ocean surface temperatures have risen +0.6°C/century during the same time period. The trend has increased to +0.17°C/decade during the past 25-year period (1979-2004) for combined land and ocean temperatures.
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Annual 1901-2003
Seasonal 1901-2003
Seasonal 1979-2003
References
IPCC, 2001: Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. J.T. Houghton, Y. Ding, D.J. Griggs, M. Noguer, P.J. van der Linden, X. Dai, K. Maskell, and C.A. Johnson (Eds.), Cambridge University Press, 881 pp.
Quayle, R.G., T.C. Peterson, A.N. Basist, and C.S. Godfrey, 1999: An operational near real-time global temperature index. Geophysical research letters , 26 (3), 333-336.
Smith, T.M., and R.W.Reynolds, 2005: A global merged land air and sea surface temperature reconstruction based on historical observations (1880-1997) (J.Climate, in press)
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