Time series of NASA/GISS land-ocean temperature index

Source: R/giss.R

A data frame containing the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) time series called LOTI (Land-Ocean Temperature Index) of surface temperature anomaly.

data(giss, package="ocedata")

Details

This is data frame with columns named year for decimal year (sampled monthly and represented here at mid-month, i.e. the first sample in any given year is at year+1/24) and index for the temperature anomaly. The resolution of the latter is 0.01C. The details of the original data processing are provided in References 1 and 2, and the site of the (Land-Ocean Temperature Index. Anyone using the present dataset is advised very strongly to read the NASA documents on changes to the processing of the data (see Reference 3).

The data were downloaded from Reference 1, yielding a text file that starts as in shown below. These data were then read with R code (reference 5) that skips the headers, chops out the annual means and then assigns columns to year fractions, e.g. the first two numbers in the data shown below are -29 and -20, yielding values -0.29degC and -0.20degC, and times are here represented as 1880+1/24 and 1880+3/24, i.e. 1880.042 and 1880.125.

        GLOBAL Land-Ocean Temperature Index in 0.01 degrees Celsius   base period: 1951-1980

                    sources:  GHCN-v3 1880-11/2015 + SST: ERSST v4 1880-11/2015
                    using elimination of outliers and homogeneity adjustment
                    Notes: 1950 DJF = Dec 1949 - Feb 1950 ;  ***** = missing

                                                                     AnnMean
Year   Jan  Feb  Mar  Apr  May  Jun  Jul  Aug  Sep  Oct  Nov  Dec    J-D D-N    DJF  MAM  JJA  SON  Year
1880   -29  -20  -18  -27  -14  -28  -22   -7  -16  -15  -18  -20    -19 ***   ****  -19  -19  -16  1880
1881    -9  -13    2   -2   -4  -28   -5   -2   -8  -19  -25  -14    -11 -11    -14   -1  -12  -17  1881
1882    10    9    2  -19  -17  -24   -9    4    0  -22  -20  -24     -9  -8      1  -11  -10  -14  1882

References

  1. Web location of the raw LOTI data: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

  2. GISTEMP Team, 2015: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP). NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

  3. J. Hansen, R. Ruedy, M. Sato and K. Lo, 2010. Global surface temperature change. Rev. Geophys., 48, RG4004. https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00510u.html

  4. Updates to analysis: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates_v3/

  5. R code to convert from NASA format to the format stored here https://github.com/dankelley/ocedata/blob/master/create_data/giss/create_giss.R