Calculating The Global Temperature
Deriving a reliable global temperature from the instrument data is not easy because the instruments are not evenly distributed across the planet, the hardware and observing locations have changed over the years, and there has been extensive land use change (such as urbanization) around some of the sites.
The calculation needs to filter out the changes that have occurred over time that are not climate related (e.g. urban heat islands), then interpolate across regions where instrument data has historically been sparse (e.g. in the southern hemisphere and at sea), before an average can be taken.
There are three main datasets showing analyses of global temperatures, all developed since the late 1970s: the HadCRUT analysis is compiled in a collaboration between the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research,, independent analyses largely based on the same raw data are produced using different levels of interpolation by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and by the National Climatic Data Center. These datasets are updated on a monthly basis and are generally in close agreement.
In the late 1990s, the Goddard team used the same data to produce a global map of temperature anomalies to illustrate the difference between the current temperature and average temperatures prior to 1950 across every part of the globe.
Read more about this topic: Instrumental Temperature Record
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