The measurement of climate change using data from the Advanced Very High Resolution and Along Track Scanning Radiometers

Abstract

[1] Global sea-surface temperature is an important indicator of climate change, with the ability to reflect warming/cooling climate trends. The detection of such trends requires rigorous measurements that are global, accurate, and consistent. Space instruments can provide the means to achieve these required attributes in sea-surface temperature data. Analyses of two independent data sets from the Advanced Very High Resolution and Along Track Scanning Radiometers series of space sensors during the period 1985 to 2000 reveal trends of increasing global temperature with magnitudes of 0.09°C and 0.13°C per decade, respectively, closely matching that expected due to current levels of greenhouse gas exchange. In addition, an analysis based upon singular value decomposition, allowing the removal of El Niño in order to examine areas of change other than the tropical Pacific region, indicates that the 1997 El Niño event affected sea-surface temperature globally. The methodology demonstrated here can be applied to other data sets, which cover long time series observations of geophysical observations in order to characterize long-term change. The conclusion is that satellite sea-surface temperature provides an important means to quantify and explore the processes of climate change.

Variability and 20-Year Trends in Satellite-Derived Surface Chlorophyll Concentrations in Large Marine Ecosystems around South and Western Central America

“…Trend analyses of global sea surface temperature (SST) indicate mean increases of 0.71 • C century −1 since 1900 (Wu et al, 2012) and between 0.09 • ± 0.03 and 0.18 • ± 0.04 • C decade −1 since the 1980s (Lawrence et al, 2004;Good et al, 2007). Longterm trends in chlorophyll concentrations are variable, with areas of increasing and decreasing chlorophyll around the globe (Gregg et al, 2005;Demarcq, 2009;Saulquin et al, 2013;Boyce et al, 2014;Gregg and Rousseaux, 2014;O'Brien et al, 2017).…”

The Global Trend in Sea Surface Temperature from 20 Years of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer Data

“…Negative trends were also found in the mid-and northeast Pacific and at the lowest latitudes. Most recently, Lawrence et al (2004) compared global trends determined from 16 yr of the Pathfinder reprocessing of AVHRR data (version 4.1) and 8 yr of ATSR data. Their methodology included removing the El Niño component from the data, which can reduce the length of time series required to detect trends with confidence by 1-2 yr (Allen et al 1994).…”

Trend patterns in global sea surface temperature

“…A possible solution is to remove the leading mode from an EOF analysis for the tropical Pacific area (e.g. Cane et al, 1997;Lawrence et al, 2004), but this procedure does not remove extra-regional variability associated with ENSO. Trend-EOFs derived for the 1982-2006 period are far better to decompose the global SST field into two trend patterns: a first mode associated with long-term variability and a second mode associated with ENSOrelated variability.…”

“…The long-term variability of the SST field can be described through the computation of regional linear trends (Strong et al, 2000;Andersen et al, 2002), or through the computation of the linear trend of globally averaged SST (Lawrence et al, 2004). However, the description of long-term variability by a linear trend considers only the temporal, and not the spatial structure of the SST field.…”

“…Furthermore, linear trends are very sensitive to the time-span over which they are computed, and the influence of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-related variability needs to be empirically accounted before the computation of the trends (e.g. Lawrence et al, 2004).…”