Modelling current trends in Northern Hemisphere temperatures

✍ Scribed by Terence C. Mills

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 216 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0899-8418
• DOI: 10.1002/joc.1286

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Fitting a trend is of interest in many disciplines, but it is of particular importance in climatology, where estimating the current and recent trend in temperature is thought to provide a major indication of the presence of global warming. A range of ad hoc methods of trend fitting have been proposed, with little consensus as to the most appropriate techniques to use. The aim of this paper is to consider a range of trend extraction techniques, none of which require ‘padding’ out the series beyond the end of the available observations, and to use these to estimate the trend of annual mean Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperatures. A comparison of the trends estimated by these methods thus provides a robust indication of the likely range of current trend temperature increases and hence inform, in a timely quantitative fashion, arguments based on global temperature data concerning the nature and extent of global warming and climate change. For the complete sample 1856–2003, the trend is characterised as having long waves about an underlying increasing level. Since around 1970, all techniques display a pronounced warming trend. However, they also provide a range of trend functions so that extrapolation far into the future would be a hazardous exercise. Copyright © 2006 Royal Meteorological Society.