Antarctic Land Surface Temperature (part 1)

I take a look at land surface temperature for the Antarctic continent to find rather patchy data and a situation that is being shamelessly exploited by the alarmist press

In the last article we took a look at Antarctic sea ice extent in relation to sea surface temperature only to discover a complex picture. Between 1979 and 1993 sea ice extent waxed and waned with the seasons, with no obvious relationship to sea surface temperature. After 1993 a modest negative relationship appears between sea ice extent and SST. What we need to do now is take a look at the land surface temperature down under and see what this tells us.

I don’t trust the highly-processed gridded products produced by NOAA, Berkeley and the Hadley Centre, so I once again followed my preferred path of digging out daily temperature data from individual stations within the Global Historical Climatology Network (Daily) Database (GHCN-D) using the rather handy Climate Explorer.

A quick query yielded 56 stations within Antarctica with daily records dating from 1954 to present, with the earliest data being collected at Mawson Research Station. Here’s a snippet from Wiki to whet the whistle:

The Ma…