Early-twentieth-century cold bias in ocean surface temperature observations

Abstract

The observed temperature record, which combines sea surface temperatures with near-surface air temperatures over land, is crucial for understanding climate variability and change^1-4. However, early records of global mean surface temperature are uncertain owing to changes in measurement technology and practice, partial documentation^5-8, and incomplete spatial coverage⁹. Here we show that existing estimates of ocean temperatures in the early twentieth century (1900-1930) are too cold, based on independent statistical reconstructions of the global mean surface temperature from either ocean or land data. The ocean-based reconstruction is on average about 0.26 °C colder than the land-based one, despite very high agreement in all other periods. The ocean cold anomaly is unforced, and internal variability in climate models cannot explain the observed land-ocean discrepancy. Several lines of evidence based on attribution, timescale analysis, coastal grid cells and palaeoclimate data support the argument of a substantial cold bias in the observed global sea-surface-temperature record in the early twentieth century. Although estimates of global warming since the mid-nineteenth century are not affected, correcting the ocean cold bias would result in a more modest early-twentieth-century warming trend¹⁰, a lower estimate of decadal-scale variability inferred from the instrumental record³, and better agreement between simulated and observed warming than existing datasets suggest².