A new global gridded radiosonde temperature data base and recent temperature trends

Abstract

We present a new analysis of global radiosonde temperature data. From 1979 onwards, the data from the Australasian region have been corrected for instrument-related discontinuities with the help of comparisons with collocated retrievals from satellite-based Microwave Sounding Units (MSU) and metadata: in future work, adjustments will be applied worldwide and extended to earlier years. The data are stored as monthly anomalies from a 1971-1990 reference period on a 5° latitude × 10° longitude grid at 8 levels from 50 hPa to 850 hPa. Seasonal and annual temperature anomalies have also been created on a 10° × 20° grid using an eigenvector reconstruction method to filter noise. Latitude-height profiles of zonal-mean temperature changes since the 1960s show significant cooling in the lower stratosphere, especially in middle and high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, but the cooling over Australasia is less than shown by unadjusted data. Warming dominates the troposphere but is not a maximum in the tropical upper troposphere. In the annual mean, tropospheric warming is greatest around 45°N and possibly in the data-sparse high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. U.S. copyright. Published in 1997 by the American Geophysical Union.