CRUTEM4 (Climatic Research Unit Temperature) Arctic Land Air Temperature, 1850-2020

These datasets have been developed by the Climatic Research Unit (University of East Anglia) in conjunction with the Hadley Centre (UK Met Office), apart from the sea surface temperature (SST) dataset which was developed solely by the Hadley Centre. These datasets will be updated at roughly monthly intervals into the future. Hemispheric and global averages as monthly and annual values are available as separate files.
The gridded data are based on an archive of monthly mean temperatures provided by more than 5500 weather stations distributed around the world. Each station temperature is converted to an anomaly from the 1961-90 average temperature for that station, and each grid-box value is the mean of all the station anomalies within that grid box. As well as the mean anomaly, estimates are made of the uncertainties arising from thermometer accuracy, homogenisation, sampling grid boxes with a finite number of measurements available, large-scale biases such as urbanisation and estimation of regional averages with non-complete global measurement coverage.