Global ACTUAL average temperature

[snowking]

I'm wondering if anyone is able to help

 

I have been carrying out some research as part of an article i'm about to write based around AGW vs Solar Influence. Thus far I have been using the CET, but I am now looking to produce graphs based around global temperatures. However, I have been unable to find any dataset that offers the actual global average temperature (either on a monthly or annual basis) as opposed to the temperature anomaly. I must also say at this stage that the reasoning given for the lack of this actual temperature data amongst any of the HAD, CRU or NOAA sets seems rather suspect to me, for example:

 

 

Anomalies are used because:

• They are relatively constant over large areas, even if the actual temperature at different locations is quite different. In other words, the anomalies can tell us something about the temperature over a much larger area than the temperature that is actually measured.
• They help to avoid biases by making the data record less sensitive to missing data. For example, imagine a situation where observations from an observing station in the Arctic were missing in one month. If actual temperatures were being averaged together, the global average temperature would seem warmer in that month because temperatures in a cold region of the globe were missing. This does not occur when averaging anomalies, although the lack of knowledge of the temperature anomaly in that region would still reduce the accuracy of the global average.

Perhaps I am just oversimplifying things here, but surely in order to work out the anomaly vs the long term mean, you first have to calculate the actual average, before then calculating the difference between the long term mean and the actual average value to give you the anomaly? In which case, it seems a mystery to me as to why the actual temperature values are not published.

 

Anyway, any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Ideally if the temperature sets were provided in some sort of tabular/spreadsheet form that would be great, but even if only provided in a text format I can always manually copy/paste the data across.

 

Many Thanks,

 

SK

[BornFromTheVoid]

I'm wondering if anyone is able to help

 

I have been carrying out some research as part of an article i'm about to write based around AGW vs Solar Influence. Thus far I have been using the CET, but I am now looking to produce graphs based around global temperatures. However, I have been unable to find any dataset that offers the actual global average temperature (either on a monthly or annual basis) as opposed to the temperature anomaly. I must also say at this stage that the reasoning given for the lack of this actual temperature data amongst any of the HAD, CRU or NOAA sets seems rather suspect to me, for example:

 

 

Anomalies are used because:

• They are relatively constant over large areas, even if the actual temperature at different locations is quite different. In other words, the anomalies can tell us something about the temperature over a much larger area than the temperature that is actually measured.
• They help to avoid biases by making the data record less sensitive to missing data. For example, imagine a situation where observations from an observing station in the Arctic were missing in one month. If actual temperatures were being averaged together, the global average temperature would seem warmer in that month because temperatures in a cold region of the globe were missing. This does not occur when averaging anomalies, although the lack of knowledge of the temperature anomaly in that region would still reduce the accuracy of the global average.

Perhaps I am just oversimplifying things here, but surely in order to work out the anomaly vs the long term mean, you first have to calculate the actual average, before then calculating the difference between the long term mean and the actual average value to give you the anomaly? In which case, it seems a mystery to me as to why the actual temperature values are not published.

 

Anyway, any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Ideally if the temperature sets were provided in some sort of tabular/spreadsheet form that would be great, but even if only provided in a text format I can always manually copy/paste the data across.

 

Many Thanks,

 

SK

 

Hi SK, the reasoning for using anomalies there, have you copied and pasted it from somewhere? What kind of analysis are you looking to do? The reasoning makes perfect sense to me, what do you find suspect?

 

It seems to be, based on the explanation given that you posted, that the actual temperature for the individual stations are calculated. Then this is converted to the anomaly, for that individual station. After that, the anomalies are combined for produce a global anomaly (rather than having a global temperature, then subtracting it from the global average)

 

If you want a rough version of global temperature, the NCEP reanalysis might do it for you http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl

It gives the data only back to 1948, but it's easy to get into excel.

[snowking]

Hi SK, the reasoning for using anomalies there, have you copied and pasted it from somewhere? What kind of analysis are you looking to do? The reasoning makes perfect sense to me, what do you find suspect?

 

It seems to be, based on the explanation given that you posted, that the actual temperature for the individual stations are calculated. Then this is converted to the anomaly, for that individual station. After that, the anomalies are combined for produce a global anomaly (rather than having a global temperature, then subtracting it from the global average)

 

If you want a rough version of global temperature, the NCEP reanalysis might do it for you http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl

It gives the data only back to 1948, but it's easy to get into excel.

 

Thanks for that BFTV, that will be a huge help! And thanks for clearing up the method of calculation. The reason I found it slightly suspect is that it would be far easier to adjust anomaly data than actual data, but this explanation helps to allay my concerns.

 

The explanation came from the Met Office website here:

 

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/surface-temperature

 

I am investigating any potential links between global mean average and Central England temperatures and the following:

 

- Atmospheric C02 concentration

- Maximum (smoothed) sunspot count per cycle

- Solar cycle duration

 

The only other problem I have encountered so far is that the C02 data I have found here:

 

 Globally averaged marine surface monthly mean data

 

 

Only goes back to 1980, which makes comparisons rather limited with a much smaller sample size, however some interesting findings so far on the solar side of things, with the correlation between CET and max sunspot count giving a higher correlation than solar cycle duration, which is in contract to the paper by David Archibold based around projections of solar cycle 24 and 25, where they used the De Bilt dataset and found stronger correlation with solar cycle duration (though I suspect I may have calculated slightly differently in that I have taken the average CET through each of the solar cycles).

 

Thanks again

 

SK

[BornFromTheVoid]

Thanks for that BFTV, that will be a huge help! And thanks for clearing up the method of calculation. The reason I found it slightly suspect is that it would be far easier to adjust anomaly data than actual data, but this explanation helps to allay my concerns.

 

The explanation came from the Met Office website here:

 

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/surface-temperature

 

I am investigating any potential links between global mean average and Central England temperatures and the following:

 

- Atmospheric C02 concentration

- Maximum (smoothed) sunspot count per cycle

- Solar cycle duration

 

The only other problem I have encountered so far is that the C02 data I have found here:

 

 Globally averaged marine surface monthly mean data

 

 

Only goes back to 1980, which makes comparisons rather limited with a much smaller sample size, however some interesting findings so far on the solar side of things, with the correlation between CET and max sunspot count giving a higher correlation than solar cycle duration, which is in contract to the paper by David Archibold based around projections of solar cycle 24 and 25, where they used the De Bilt dataset and found stronger correlation with solar cycle duration (though I suspect I may have calculated slightly differently in that I have taken the average CET through each of the solar cycles).

 

Thanks again

 

SK

 

No worries.

Here's some CO2 data back to 1958. I'm sure there are longer data sets out there to freely download though....

Anywho, do post up some of your analysis. It could be a good chance for people to learn a few things, get a little critique, etc!