Assessing Recent Warming Using Instrumentally-Homogeneous Sea Surface Temperature Records

Data and methods for the paper "Assessing Recent Warming Using Instrumentally-Homogeneous Sea Surface Temperature Records". In a paper published in Science Advances, we used data from buoys, satellites, and Argo floats to construct separate instrumentally homogenous sea surface temperature records of the past two decades. We compared them to the old NOAA ERSSTv3b record, the new ERSSTv4 record, the Hadley Centre’s HadSST3 record, and the Japanese COBE-SST record. We found a strong and significant cool bias in the old NOAA record, and a more modest (but still significant) cool bias in the Hadley and Japanese records compared to buoy, satellite, and Argo float data. The new NOAA record agrees quite well with these instrumentally homogenous records. This suggests that the new NOAA record is likely the most accurate sea surface temperature record in recent years, and should help resolve some of the criticism that accompanied the original NOAA study. In order to run the code you need a UNIX-like compute (linux, MAC, or possibly a Windows system with MinGW or similar), csh or tcsh shells, cdo, python 2.7, and python libraries including numpy, scipy, matplotlib, netCDF4.