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HadSST.4.1.0.0

The Met Office Hadley Centre's sea surface temperature dataset, HadSST.4.1.0.0 is a monthly global field of SST on a 5° latitude by 5° longitude grid from 1850 to the present day. The data have been adjusted to minimise the effects of changes in instrumentation throughout the record. HadSST.4.1.0.0 is presented as a set of 200 interchangeable realisations that capture the temporal and spatial characteristics of the estimated uncertainties in the biases. In addition there are files providing the measurement and sampling uncertainties, which must be used in addition to the ensemble to obtain a comprehensive estimate of the uncertainty. The data are not interpolated.

The HadSST.4.1.0.0 dataset runs from 1850 to present and is updated monthly.

Brief description of the data

The SST data are taken from release 3.0.0 of the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set, ICOADS (external web page), from 1850 to 2014 and from ICOADS release 3.0.1 from 2015 onwards. From January 2016, these are supplemented by drifting buoy observations "Generated using E.U. Copernicus Marine Service Information" from CMEMS (Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service). HadSST.4.1.0.0 is produced by taking in situ measurements of SST from ships and buoys, rejecting measurements that fail quality checks, converting the measurements to anomalies by subtracting climatological values from the measurements, and calculating a robust average of the resulting anomalies on a 5° by 5° degree monthly grid. After gridding the anomalies, bias adjustments are applied to reduce the effects of changes in SST measuring practices. The uncertainties arising from undersampling and measurement error have been calculated for the gridded monthly data, as have the uncertainties on the bias adjustments following the procedures described in this paper.

Annualised SST anomalies
from the latest HadSST dataset

Estimated annual global, Northern and Southern Hemisphere average SST anomalies for the full gridded dataset, 1850-present, relative to the 1961-1990 average. Yearly points are a simple mean of anomalies over the 12 months in each year. Blue shading represents the 95% range of the 200-member anomaly ensemble (bias uncertainties only).

Data are available from the download page without charge under the Open Government Licence v3. Please read the terms and conditions.

References

When using the dataset in a paper, please use the following citation:

Kennedy, J. J., Rayner, N. A., Atkinson, C. P., & Killick, R. E. (2019). An Ensemble Data Set of Sea Surface Temperature Change from 1850: The Met Office Hadley Centre HadSST.4.0.0.0 Data Set. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 124. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JD029867

Product User Guide

An introduction to the data set is available as a pdf, which includes a "quick start" guide, formats and product details as well as guidance on how to use the uncertainty information. Release notes for the latest version are also provided.

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Other information

Dataset produced in collaboration with: