Abstract
Paltridge and Woodruff1 found a warming of global mean sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) of ∼1°C in the first half of the present century, but there are doubts about its reality because spurious temperature fluctuations can arise from changes in measuring instruments2,3 and because inter-annual fluctuations may contain sufficient variance to allow the observed inter-decadal variations to fall within the limits of sampling error of a stationary series3. We present here the results of analyses of worldwide SSTs and night near-surface marine air temperature (MAT) for the period 1856–1981 with the aim of estimating the magnitudes of recent climatic fluctuations of temperature at the ocean surface, taking account of changes in observing procedures. Our results show a worldwide temperature fluctuation of range ≃0.6 °C (in broad agreement with a preliminary analysis of global SST2), with the coldest period being centred around 1905–10 and the warmest occurring in the 1940s. The fluctuation has a similar magnitude to, and is nearly in phase with, climatic warmings and coolings near the surface of the Northern Hemisphere land masses for the period after 1900. Before 1900 the trends are sharply different.
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