The average global temperature anomaly in March was 1.16 C – a significant rise from February.
The main features were:
- The ending of La Nina
- Above average temperatures in central Asia and the Arctic.
- Western US and Canada colder than normal.
These are the monthly temperatures updated to March 2023
Monthly temperatures including March 2023
After the first 3 months of 2023 the average temperature for 2013 is now 0.96C above the 1961-1990 baseline.
UAH begs to differ
That’s interesting. I wonder how much of this rise is due to the sea surface temperature data ?
Land and ocean data separately is available from UAH
Ditto RichardLH…pretty dramatic difference for March. Might be worth addressing.
This looks like just about the biggest monthly rise ever and a startling divergence from UAH. Surely it is time to ask why these two datasets are diverging so dramatically.
My impression was that UAH temperatures often lag surface temperatures by a couple months. It would be worthwhile to overlay 2016 in both datasets to see what happened then.
Dear climatemusings, I overlaid these two datasets for the years 2015-2017. Although the absolute anomaly is different the increases and decreases are very highly correlated. I am unable to upload the chart but have sent it to Clive in the hope that he will post it here so you can review it yourself.
Thanks for the overlay. If I squint the right way, it looks like the orange spiked two or three months before the blue… I guess we will see if UAH spikes in the next two months or not.
UAH definitely didn’t spike this month. If it doesn’t spike by July (and surface temperatures stay high) then my theory will have been disproved.
Thanks for posting the chart Clive. Just to be clear I have bulk-shifted the anomaly values for GCHN so that they more or less overlay the UAH data. It is only meant to provide a comparison of short term trends. I find it pretty impressive that the two datasets show strong agreement as to whether the anomaly is increasing or decreasing, although as I pointed out earlier, over the longer term the two datasets are diverging with GHCN increasing faster.