Hemispheric and Large-Scale Surface Air Temperature Variations: An Extensive Revision and an Update to 2001

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Abstract
This study is an extensive revision of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) land station temperature database that is used to produce a gridbox dataset of 5° latitude × 5° longitude temperature anomalies. The new database comprises 5159 station records, of which 4167 have enough data for the 1961–90 period to calculate or estimate the necessary averages. Apart from the increase in station numbers compared to the earlier study in 1994, many station records have had their data replaced by newly homogenized series that have been produced by several recent studies. New versions of all the gridded datasets currently available on the CRU Web site (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk) have been developed. This includes combinations with marine (sea surface temperature anomalies) data over the oceans and versions with adjustment of the variance of individual gridbox series to remove the effects of changing station numbers through time. Hemispheric and global temperature averages for land areas developed with the new da... Abstract This study is an extensive revision of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) land station temperature database that is used to produce a gridbox dataset of 5° latitude × 5° longitude temperature anomalies. The new database comprises 5159 station records, of which 4167 have enough data for the 1961–90 period to calculate or estimate the necessary averages. Apart from the increase in station numbers compared to the earlier study in 1994, many station records have had their data replaced by newly homogenized series that have been produced by several recent studies. New versions of all the gridded datasets currently available on the CRU Web site (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk) have been developed. This includes combinations with marine (sea surface temperature anomalies) data over the oceans and versions with adjustment of the variance of individual gridbox series to remove the effects of changing station numbers through time. Hemispheric and global temperature averages for land areas developed with the new da...