Improvements in the GISTEMP Uncertainty Model

By Nathan Lenssen, Gavin A. Schmidt, J. Hansen, M. Menne, Avraham Persin, R. Ruedy, Daniel Zyss. Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, 2019

543 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We outline a new and improved uncertainty analysis for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature product version 4 (GISTEMP v4). Historical spatial variations in surface temperature anomalies are derived from historical weather station data and ocean data from ships, buoys, and other sensors. Uncertainties arise from measurement uncertainty, changes in spatial coverage of the station record, and systematic biases due to technology shifts and land cover changes. Previously published uncertainty estimates for GISTEMP included only the effect of incomplete station coverage. Here, we update this term using currently available spatial distributions of source data, state‐of‐the‐art reanalyses, and incorporate independently derived estimates for ocean data processing, station homogenization, and other structural biases. The resulting 95% uncertainties are near 0.05 °C in the global annual mean for the last 50 years and increase going back further in time reaching 0.15 °C in 1880. In addition, we quantify the benefits and inherent uncertainty due to the GISTEMP interpolation and averaging method. We use the total uncertainties to estimate the probability for each record year in the GISTEMP to actually be the true record year (to that date) and conclude with 87% likelihood that 2016 was indeed the hottest year of the instrumental period (so far).

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3245c96d239994d5f2ab25b41196861977cbcee6

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Citations in the corpus

Simulations for CMIP6 With the AWI Climate Model AWI‐CM‐1‐1 (2020, background): “The purple line indicates the observed 2 m temperature anomaly from Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP v4) (GISS, 2019; Hansen et al., 2010; Lenssen et al., 2019).”
SPEAR: The Next Generation GFDL Modeling System for Seasonal to Multidecadal Prediction and Projection (2020, methodology): “The second (GISTEMP v4) is from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (Lennsen et al., 2019) and was downloaded on 30 July 2019 (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/).”
Global warming in the pipeline (2022, methodology): “Observed temperature is the NASA GISS analysis [155, 156].”
The ERA5 global reanalysis: Preliminary extension to 1950 (2021, unknown): “ERA5 also lacks observations F I G U R E 20 Average surface temperature anomalies (K) relative to 1981–2010 for February 1956: (a) GISTEMP, (b) HadCRUT5, (c) ERA5 background and (d) ERA5 analysis.”