Evaluation of Greenland near surface air temperature datasets

Reeves Eyre, J. E. Jack; Zeng, Xubin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1591-2017

Articles | Volume 11, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1591-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1591-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 4

Research article

|

05 Jul 2017

Research article |

| 05 Jul 2017

Evaluation of Greenland near surface air temperature datasets

J. E. Jack Reeves Eyre and Xubin Zeng

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1591-2017-supplement

Data sets

AIRS/Aqua L3 Monthly Standard Physical Retrieval (AIRS+AMSU) 1 degree x 1 degree V006 AIRS Science Team/Joao Texeira https://doi.org/10.5067/AQUA/AIRS/DATA319

MERRA 2D IAU Diagnostic, Single Level Meteorology, Monthly Mean V5.2.0 GMAO https://doi.org/10.5067/W3UEUC5V7M9M

MERRA-2 instM_2d_asm_Nx: 2d, Monthly mean, Single Level, Assimilation, Single Level Diagnostics V5.12.4 GMAO https://doi.org/10.5067/5ESKGQTZG7FO

JRA-55: Japanese 55-year Reanalysis, Daily 3-Hourly and 6-Hourly Data Japan Meteorological Agency/Japan https://doi.org/10.5065/D6HH6H41

NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) Monthly Products, January 1979 to December 2010 NCEP https://doi.org/10.5065/D6DN438J

NCEP Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2) Monthly Products NCEP https://doi.org/10.5065/D69021ZF

Global surface temperature change J. Hansen, R. Ruedy, M. Sato, and K. Lo https://doi.org/10.1029/2010RG000345

Model code and software

CMIP5 monthly average surface air temperature from historical, historical extended and ESM historical experiments PCMDI https://pcmdi.llnl.gov/search/cmip5/

Short summary

We have used extensive air temperature measurements (~  1400 station-years) to assess more than 10 gridded datasets over the Greenland ice sheet. We recommend the best datasets for estimating past melting of the ice sheet and show that choice of dataset is important for evaluating 31 earth system models. Most, but not all, of the datasets show similar history of temperature changes over the 20th century, and the earth system models generally capture long-term warming but not decadal variations.