IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nature/v453y2008i7195d10.1038_nature06982.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A large discontinuity in the mid-twentieth century in observed global-mean surface temperature

Author

Listed:
  • David W. J. Thompson

    (Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523, USA)

  • John J. Kennedy

    (Met Office Hadley Centre)

  • John M. Wallace

    (University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA)

  • Phil D. Jones

    (Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia)

Abstract

Global temperatures: A glitch in the forties The record of global sea-surface temperatures spanning the past century provides key evidence for global warming and is much scrutinized with a view to distinguishing between anthropogenic and natural climate variability. It has been assumed that this record is now largely free of substantial uncorrected instrument biases. Not so, according to a team assembled from four of the world's leading climate research institutes. They have identified a pronounced discontinuity in the record — a sudden drop of about 0.3 °C in global sea-surface temperature in 1945 — that coincides with a significant change in the shipboard instrumentation used to collect the data. This discontinuity is 40% as large as the century-long upward trend in temperatures, so correcting for it is likely to change the overall record and its interpretation substantially.

Suggested Citation

  • David W. J. Thompson & John J. Kennedy & John M. Wallace & Phil D. Jones, 2008. "A large discontinuity in the mid-twentieth century in observed global-mean surface temperature," Nature, Nature, vol. 453(7195), pages 646-649, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:453:y:2008:i:7195:d:10.1038_nature06982
    DOI: 10.1038/nature06982
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06982
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/nature06982?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. McKitrick, Ross, 2011. "A simple state-contingent pricing rule for complex intertemporal externalities," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 111-120, January.
    2. Luis A. Gil-Alana, 2015. "Linear and segmented trends in sea surface temperature data," Journal of Applied Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(7), pages 1531-1546, July.
    3. Marina Friedrich & Luca Margaritella & Stephan Smeekes, 2023. "High-Dimensional Causality for Climatic Attribution," Papers 2302.03996, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:453:y:2008:i:7195:d:10.1038_nature06982. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.