← Search

Data · dataset · 2026

Temperature trends derived from Stratospheric Sounding Unit radiances: The effect of increasing CO₂ on the weighting function

Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research

Stratospheric Sounding Units (SSU) on the NOAA operational satellites have been the main source of near-global temperature trend data above the lower stratosphere.

Description

They have been used extensively for comparison with model-derived trends. The SSU senses in the 15 ±m band of CO₂ and hence the weighting function is sensitive to changes in CO₂ concentrations.

The impact of this change in weighting function has been ignored in all recent trend analyses. We show that the apparent trends in global-mean brightness temperature due to the change in weighting function vary from about -0.4 Kdecade⁻¹ to 0.4 Kdecade⁻¹, depending on the altitude sensed by the different SSU channels. For some channels, this apparent trend is of a similar size to the trend deduced from SSU data but ignoring the change in weighting function.

Read the rest (1 more)

In the mid-stratosphere, the revised trends are now significantly more negative and in better agreement with model-calculated trends.

Links

Get the data

Where it is published

Catalogue records · 1

Topics

Provenance · 1 source records, 7 field assertions
SourceKeyLast seenRaw
National Center for Atmospheric Research39e5e004-ab1e-40cb-a64e-34aa209344c613 d agoJSON v1
FieldAssertionExtractorEvidence
concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmentalmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmosphericmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
created_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
descriptionsource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/notes
publication_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
titlesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/title
updated_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0