Global Temperature and Europe's Frigid Air

in the preliminary GISS analysis. This is the warmest January-November in the GISS analysis, which covers 131 years. However, it is only a few hundredths of a degree warmer than 2005, so it is possible that the final GISS results for the full year will find 2010 and 2005 to have the same temperature...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.406.5429
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20101211_TemperatureAndEurope.pdf
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Summary:in the preliminary GISS analysis. This is the warmest January-November in the GISS analysis, which covers 131 years. However, it is only a few hundredths of a degree warmer than 2005, so it is possible that the final GISS results for the full year will find 2010 and 2005 to have the same temperature within the margin of error. As described in an in-press paper (link provided below) that defines the GISS analysis method, we estimate a two-standard-deviation uncertainty (95 percent confidence interval) of 0.05°C for comparison of global temperatures in nearby recent years. The magnitude of this uncertainty and the small temperature differences among different years is one reason that alternative analyses yield different rankings for the warmest years. However, results for overall global temperature change of the past century are in good agreement among the alternative analyses (by GISS, NOAA National Climate Data Center, and the joint analysis of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit). Figure 1(b) shows November 2010 surface temperature anomalies based only on surface air measurements at meteorological stations and Antarctic research stations. In producing this map the radius of influence of a given station is limited to 250 km to allow extreme temperature