GISS Surface Temperature Analysis

One-Line Description:

Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) surface temperature analysis for the globe.

Spatial Coverage:

1.0 degree latitude x 1.0 degree longitude global grid (360x180).
89.5N - 89.5S, 0.5E - 360.5E.

Variable Statistic Level Download File Create Plot/Subset

Air Temperature Monthly Anomaly: 250km smoothed Surface air.mon.anom.nc

Air Temperature Monthly Anomaly: 1200km smoothed Surface air.mon.anom.nc

Combined SST/Air Temperature Monthly Anomaly: 250km smoothed Surface air.mon.anom.nc

Combined SST/Air Temperature Monthly Anomaly: 1200km smoothed Surface air.mon.anom.nc

Variable	Statistic	Level	Download File
Air Temperature	Monthly Anomaly: 250km smoothed	Surface	air.mon.anom.nc
Air Temperature	Monthly Anomaly: 1200km smoothed	Surface	air.mon.anom.nc
Combined SST/Air Temperature	Monthly Anomaly: 250km smoothed	Surface	air.mon.anom.nc
Combined SST/Air Temperature	Monthly Anomaly: 1200km smoothed	Surface	air.mon.anom.nc

Usage Restrictions:

None

Detailed Description:

From the NASA webpage: "The NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) provides a measure of the changing global surface temperature with monthly resolution for the period since 1880, when a reasonably global distribution of meteorological stations was established. Input data for the analysis, collected by many national meteorological services around the world, is the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997) except that the USHCN station records included were replaced by a later corrected version. These data were augmented by SCAR data from Antarctic stations. Documentation of our analysis is provided by Hansen et al. (1999), with several modifications described by Hansen et al. (2001). The GISS analysis is updated monthly.".

The data is available on an equal area grid. NASA provides code to read it onto a 1x1 grid. They have two smoothing levels available for their updated data: 250km and 1200km smoothing. They make available a land only version and a version which includes the hadISST (post Dec 1981) and NOAA OI V2 for data over the oceans. There ARE missing data values.

Caveats:

None

Related File Naming & Structure Information:

File Names:

var.time.stat.nc (In directory: /Datasets.private/gistemp/)

Dataset Format and Size:

4 PSD standard NetCDF ~200 Mbyte file for each monthly file (packed).

Missing Data:

Missing data is flagged with a value of 32766s.

Citation:

Please note: If you acquire GISTEMP data products from PSD, we ask that you acknowledge us in your use of the data. This may be done by including text such as GISTEMP data provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/ in any documents or publications using these data. We would also appreciate receiving a copy of the relevant publications. This will help PSD to justify keeping the GISTEMP data set freely available online in the future. Thank you!