De. Parker et al., INTERDECADAL CHANGES OF SURFACE-TEMPERATURE SINCE THE LATE-19TH-CENTURY, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-ATMOSPHERES, 99(D7), 1994, pp. 14373-14399
We present global fields of decadal annual surface temperature anomali
es, referred to the period 1951-1980, for each decade from 1881-1890 t
o 1981-1990 and for 1984-1993. In addition, we show decadal calendar-s
easonal anomaly fields for the warm decades 1936-1945 and 1981-1990. T
he fields are based on sea surface temperature (SST) and land surface
air temperature data. The SSTs are corrected for the pre-World War II
use of uninsulated sea temperature buckets and incorporate adjusted sa
tellite-based SSTs from 1982 onward. Our results extend those publishe
d in the 1990 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Scientific Ass
essment and its 1992 supplement. We assess the impact of various sourc
es of error in the fields. Despite poor data coverage initially and ar
ound the two World Wars the generally cold end of the nineteenth centu
ry and start to the twentieth century are confirmed, together with the
substantial warming between about 1920 and 1940. Slight cooling of th
e northern hemisphere took place between the 1950s and the mid-1970s,
although slight warming continued south of the equator. Recent warmth
has been most marked over the northern continents in winter and spring
, but the 1980s were warm almost everywhere apart from Greenland, the
northwestern Atlantic and the midlatitude North Pacific. Parts of the
middle- to high-latitude southern ocean may also have been cool in the
1980s, but in this area the 1951-1980 climatology is unreliable. The
impact of the satellite data is reduced because the record of blended
satellite and in situ SST is still too short to yield a climatology fr
om which to calculate representative anomalies reflecting climatic cha
nge in the southern ocean. However, we propose a method of using exist
ing satellite data in a step toward this target. The maps are condense
d into global and hemispheric decadal surface temperature anomalies. W
e show the sensitivity of these estimated anomalies to alternative met
hods of compositing the spatially incomplete fields. Running decadal z
onal means and annual global and hemispheric time series are also show
n. Finally, we discuss some salient features in terms of observed atmo
spheric circulation changes and of the results of climate model integr
ations with increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases.