Central England Temperature (part 1)

A sideways look at the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world

If you haven’t come across this extraordinary dataset before today you are in for a treat! Daily and monthly data records for this corker may be downloaded from here and a useful PDF providing background may be found here. The Met Office Hadley Centre provides the following handy summary:

These daily and monthly temperatures are representative of a roughly triangular area of the United Kingdom enclosed by Lancashire, London and Bristol. The monthly series, which begins in 1659, is the longest available instrumental record of temperature in the world. The daily mean-temperature series begins in 1772. Manley (1953, 1974) compiled most of the monthly series, covering 1659 to 1973. These data were updated to 1991 by Parker et al (1992), who also calculated the daily series. Both series are now kept up to date by the Climate Data Monitoring section of the Hadley Centre, Met Office. Since 1974 the data have been adjusted to allow for urban warming: currently a correction of -0.2 °C is applie…