Abstract
Two widely used sea surface temperature (SST) datasets are compared in this article. We examine characteristics in the climate variability of SST in the China Seas.Two series yielded almost the same warming trend for 1890-2013 (0.7-0.8°C/100 years). However, HadISST1 series shows much stronger warming trends during 1961-2013 and 1981-2013 than that of COBE SST2 series. The disagreement between data sets was marked after 1981. For the hiatus period 1998-2013, the cooling trends of HadISST1 series is much lower than that of COBE SST2. These differences between the two datasets are possibly caused by the different observations which are incorporated to fill with data-sparse regions since 1982. Those findings illustrate that there are some uncertainties in the estimate of SST warming patterns in certain regions. The results also indicate that the temporal and spatial deficiency of observed data is still the biggest handicap for analyzing multi-scale SST characteristics in regional area.
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