Antarctic Land Surface Temperature (part 8)
In this article I derive anomalies for 17 long series bases using a common 14-year climate normal reference period for 1979 – 2018 and derive a continental anomaly
Well, we’ve had a jolly good thrash through the surface temperature data and discovered how easy it is to jump to the wrong conclusions owing to methodological issues of making reliable and consistently reliable measurements down in the harshest climate on Earth. NSST v6.0 satellite data came to the rescue in part 7 and this gave me the idea of trying to merge as many base records as possible to give a quasi-definitive GHCN land record.
I started out listing all bases with at least 30 year’s worth of annual means for the period 1979 – 2018 to see what years they all had in common. It turns out that 17 bases had 14 years worth of data collection in common over this time frame and so I obtained those 14-year sample means for each base in turn to enable the derivation of temperature anomalies - a task made all the more rather enjoyable by a tin of freshly baked flapjack and a cafetière of Waitrose No.1 Colombian Reserve Ground Coffee – a blend that I find particularly helps improve modelling results. Herewith a table of summary statistics for the long series stations 1979 – 2018 so you get a feel for the sample: