Global temperature evolution 1979–2010

By G. Foster, Stefan Rahmstorf. 2011

401 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze five prominent time series of global temperature (over land and ocean) for their common time interval since 1979: three surface temperature records (from NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC and HadCRU) and two lower-troposphere (LT) temperature records based on satellite microwave sensors (from RSS and UAH). All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr−1. When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole time interval. In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009 and 2010.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0caa1baa379bf6b14389ee3a83bcff23cf0a30b0

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Citations in the corpus

Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community (2015, neutral): “modern global warming (1970–2013); see (Foster and Rahmstorf, 2011).”
Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011 (2012, methodology): “Global temperature data can be adjusted for solar variations, volcanic aerosols and ENSO using multivariate correlation analysis (Foster and Rahmstorf 2011, Lean and Rind 2008, 2009, Schönwiese et al 2010), since independent data series for these factors exist.”
Global temperature evolution: recent trends and some pitfalls (2017, background): “…forcing data) it is possible to identify specific physical causes of temperature fluctuations, and this is a fruitful topic of ongoing climate research (Foster and Rahmstorf 2011, Kosaka and Xie 2013, England et al 2014, Suckling et al 2016) which helps us to understand natural climate variability.”
Achieving Climate Change Absolute Accuracy in Orbit (2013, background): “This uncertainty is partially due to the short observational records, the nonstationarity of recent climate, and unresolved contributions of multidecadal oscillations (Swanson et al. 2009; DelSole et al. 2011; Huber and Knutti, 2011; Leroy et al. 2008b; Foster and Rahmstorf 2011).”