Surface Temperature variability from AIRS.

Abstract:

To address the existence and possible causes of the climate hiatus in the Earth’s global temperature we investigate the trends and variability in the surface temperature using retrievals obtained from the measurements by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and its companion instrument, the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU), onboard of Aqua spacecraft in 2002-2014for the day and night conditions. The data used are L3 monthly means on a 1x1degree spatial grid. We separate the land and ocean temperatures, as well as temperatures in Artic, Antarctic and desert regions. We compare the satellite data with the new surface data produced by Karl et al. (2015) who denies the reality of the climate hiatus. The difference in the regional trends can help to explain why the global surface temperature remains almost unchanged but the frequency of occurrence of the extreme events increases under rising anthropogenic forcing. The day-night difference is an indicator of the anthropogenic trend.

This work was supported by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of

Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.