Earth Atmospheric Land Surface Temperature and Station Quality in the Contiguous United States

Earth Atmospheric Land Surface Temperature and Station Quality in the Contiguous United States

A survey organized by A. Watts has thrown doubt on the usefulness of historic thermometer data in analyzing the record of global warming. That survey found that 70% of the USHCN temperature stations had potential temperature biases from 2°C to 5°C, large compared to the estimated global warming (1956 to 2005) of 0.64 ± 0.13°C. In the current paper we study this issue with two approaches. The first is a simple histogram study of temperature trends in groupings of stations based on Watt’s survey of station quality.