Wood Romances

Within the last week or so, NOAA issued an update to their Global Mean Surface Temperature dataset. The update to v. 5.1 now has full global coverage (mostly due to increased coverage of the Arctic) and extends back to 1850. The results are pretty close to to the v. 5 dataset, and I suspect differences in trends between the two will not be significant over time frames of 30 years or longer. Below I plotted v. 5 and v. 5.1 with the difference between the two (v.5.1 - v.5). The changes are minimal and there is virtually no trend to the difference. The additional warming in recent years is likely due to the increased Arctic coverage . I also found the global raw data (with no adjustments or bias correction) and plotted v. 5 and v 5.1 so that you can see the effect of bias correction on global temperatures. The largest adjustments occur before 1944, and they are dominated by increasing sea surface temperatures to account for changes in the sampling methods from ships. Contrary to the clai...