Abstract
Abstract A comparison of near-global monthly mean surface temperature anomalies to those of global Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) 2R temperatures for 1979–95 reveals differences in global annual mean trends that are shown to be largely attributable to important physical differences in the quantities that are measured. Maps of standard deviations of the monthly mean anomalies, which can be viewed as mostly measuring the size of the climate signal, reveal pronounced differences regionally in each dataset. At the surface, the variability of temperatures is relatively small over the oceans but large over land, whereas in the MSU record the signal is much more zonally symmetric. The largest differences are found over the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans where the monthly standard deviations of the MSU temperatures are larger by more than a factor of 2. Locally over land, the variance of the surface record is larger than that of the MSU. In addition to differential responses to forcings from the El Nino-S...
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