Are Satellites More Accurate than Surface Thermometers?
Surface thermometers are old technology, and to be useful, they have to be extremely limited (more on this in a minute). Satellites, however, are the latest and greatest technology and are capable of measuring temperature (kind of) of different strata of the atmosphere. It can be tempting to think that we should trust satellite data over surface thermometers. But is that true? The tl;dr here is that surface thermometers are more accurate for Global Mean Surface Temperatures (GMST) while satellites make up for their lack of accuracy with some very helpful and useful information about how layers of the atmosphere are changing. In this post, I want to consider first how surface thermometers compare to satellites in general. In a second, follow up post , I will look more closely at individual satellite datasets and consider if one is more accurate than the others. The Instrumental Record Perhaps the biggest advantage of surface thermometers is that it's old technology. The instrumental...