It appears that the “cooling” period from the 1930 through the 1970s was an artifact due to the way sea surface temperature was measured. James Annan says “oops”, and points out that this has been discussed at ClimateAudit before. In fact, it was discussed almost two years ago. But how will this change the temperature record? The Nature paper doesn’t actually offer a revised surface temperature data.

In the comments at James Annan’s blog, he writes:

Forest suggests knocking down the war years a bit which would be most politically convenient, McIntyre suggests warming up the post-war years a bit…

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Lately, I’ve been looking at the differences in the two satellite temperature records. I first blogged about how there is a divergence in the two time series (RSS and UAH) with power at 1 year. In the same post, I noted that there appears to be a step in the difference time series, but at the time I did not pursue it further. Yesterday, I finally got around to blogging about the apparent change point in the difference time series.

I think I’ve exhausted the options of looking at only the global monthly temperature anomaly time series. Instead, this post will be about spatial differences in the two records. I obtained gridded data from UAH and RSS.
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I’ve blogged before about the differences in the two satellite tropospheric temperature records. There are two major features of the difference time series: one is an apparent 1-year periodicity, and the other is a step in the year 1992. When calculating trends, the first has only a small effect. Unless you’re calculating trends for less than a few years, which would be silly. This post will take a look at the other issue. What are the implications for the change point in 1992.

An interesting side note is that both RealClimate and ClimateAudit have recently blogged about change points, and this post was written before before I had read them. Talk about blogospheric voodoo.
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I’ve been busy over the last couple days, not only with my real work, but also trying to decode the CRN data. About 2 weeks ago, Anthony Watts posted the link to the FTP site where anyone can download the temperature data from the new network. There are many files. And that’s an understatement. They have one file for every hour that has passed since the initiation of the network in late 2005.
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