Monitoring Global Monthly Mean Surface Temperatures

Abstract
An assessment is made of how well the monthly mean surface temperatures for the decade of the 1980s are known. The sources of noise in the data, the numbers of observations, and the spatial coverage are appraised for comparison with the climate signal, and different analyzed results are compared to see how reproducible they are. The data are further evaluated by comparing anomalies of near-global monthly mean surface temperatures with those of global satellite channel 2 microwave sounding unit (MSU) temperatures for 144 months from 1979 to 1990. Very distinctive patterns are seen in the correlation coefficients, which range from high (>0.8) over the extratropical continents of the Northern Hemisphere, to moderate (∼0,5) over tropical and subtropical land areas, to very low over the southern oceans and tropical western Pacific. The physical difference between the two temperature measurements is one factor in these patterns. The correlation coefficient is a measure of the signal-to-noise ratio, and... Abstract An assessment is made of how well the monthly mean surface temperatures for the decade of the 1980s are known. The sources of noise in the data, the numbers of observations, and the spatial coverage are appraised for comparison with the climate signal, and different analyzed results are compared to see how reproducible they are. The data are further evaluated by comparing anomalies of near-global monthly mean surface temperatures with those of global satellite channel 2 microwave sounding unit (MSU) temperatures for 144 months from 1979 to 1990. Very distinctive patterns are seen in the correlation coefficients, which range from high (>0.8) over the extratropical continents of the Northern Hemisphere, to moderate (∼0,5) over tropical and subtropical land areas, to very low over the southern oceans and tropical western Pacific. The physical difference between the two temperature measurements is one factor in these patterns. The correlation coefficient is a measure of the signal-to-noise ratio, and...