TY - JOUR
T1 - Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends
AU - Pielke, Roger A.
AU - Davey, Christopher A.
AU - Niyogi, Dev
AU - Fall, Souleymane
AU - Steinweg-Woods, Jesse
AU - Hubbard, Ken
AU - Lin, Xiaomao
AU - Cai, Ming
AU - Kim, Young Kwon
AU - Li, Hong
AU - Nielsen-Gammon, John
AU - Gallo, Kevin
AU - Hale, Robert
AU - Mahmood, Rezaul
AU - Foster, Stuart
AU - McNider, Richard T.
AU - Blanken, Peter
PY - 2007/12/27
Y1 - 2007/12/27
N2 - This paper documents various unresolved issues in using surface temperature trends as a metric for assessing global and regional climate change. A series of examples ranging from errors caused by temperature measurements at a monitoring station to the undocumented biases in the regionally and globally averaged time series are provided. The issues are poorly understood or documented and relate to micrometeorological impacts due to warm bias in nighttime minimum temperatures, poor siting of the instrumentation, effect of winds as well as surface atmospheric water vapor content on temperature trends, the quantification of uncertainties in the homogenization of surface temperature data, and the influence of land use/land cover (LULC) change on surface temperature trends. Because of the issues presented in this paper related to the analysis of multidecadal surface temperature we recommend that greater, more complete documentation and quantification of these issues be required for all observation stations that are intended to be used in such assessments. This is necessary for confidence in the actual observations of surface temperature variability and long-term trends.
AB - This paper documents various unresolved issues in using surface temperature trends as a metric for assessing global and regional climate change. A series of examples ranging from errors caused by temperature measurements at a monitoring station to the undocumented biases in the regionally and globally averaged time series are provided. The issues are poorly understood or documented and relate to micrometeorological impacts due to warm bias in nighttime minimum temperatures, poor siting of the instrumentation, effect of winds as well as surface atmospheric water vapor content on temperature trends, the quantification of uncertainties in the homogenization of surface temperature data, and the influence of land use/land cover (LULC) change on surface temperature trends. Because of the issues presented in this paper related to the analysis of multidecadal surface temperature we recommend that greater, more complete documentation and quantification of these issues be required for all observation stations that are intended to be used in such assessments. This is necessary for confidence in the actual observations of surface temperature variability and long-term trends.
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U2 - 10.1029/2006JD008229
DO - 10.1029/2006JD008229
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:49249083955
SN - 0148-0227
VL - 112
JO - Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres
JF - Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres
IS - 24
M1 - D24S08
ER -