Met Office UK: New global temperature analyses

The Met Office, as the United Kingdom’s representative to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), has proposed a programme to deliver a new global temperature dataset.

This initiative will augment, not replace, the current temperature datasets and involve work across the international meteorological community. The proposed dataset will provide information on changing extremes and regional variability, and so strengthen decisions on adapting to climate change.

This will require surface temperature datasets with more detail than the current monthly averaged temperatures. Data will be available at daily, or even finer time scales, using methods that are fully peer reviewed and open to scrutiny providing independent assessments of surface temperature.

The new analysis will add to and refine the existing datasets which all show global and continental-scale multi-decadal trends of increasing temperatures.

For further information contact Met Office press office +44 (0)1392 886655 or e-mail: pressoffice@metoffice.gov.uk

Notes to editors:

The Met Office Hadley Centre advises the UK government on climate change research. Its work is, in part, jointly funded by Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and DECC, the Dept for Energy and Climate Change. The Met Office, in collaboration with the University of East Anglia, maintains one of the existing global temperature records, which is used in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Met Office is continuing its programme of releasing the station temperature records that underpins HadCRUT. The Met Office has already made over 3000 of the stations publicly available and as soon as the remaining permissions are in place to release the remaining stations it will do so. More information at: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/news/latest/data.html