Everyone’s interested in the global climate these days, so I’ve been looking at the GISTEMP temperature series, from the GISS (NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies). I was recently analyzing the data and it turned into an interesting data forensics operation that I hope will inspire you to dig a little deeper into your data.

Let’s start with the data. GISS has a huge selection of data for the discerning data connoisseur, so which to choose? The global average seems too coarse — the northern and southern hemispheres are out of phase and dominated by different geography. On the other hand, the gridded data is huge and requires all kinds of spatially-saavy processing to be useful. (We may go there in a future post, but not today.) So let’s start with the two hemisphere monthly average datasets, which I’ll refer to as GISTEMP NH and GISTEMP SH.

To be specific, these time series are GISTEMP LOTI (Land Ocean Temperature Index) which means that they cover both land and sea. GISS has land-only data and combines this with NOAA’s sea-only data from ERSST (Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature). I’d also point out that all of the temperature data I’ll use is measured as an anomaly from the average temperature over the years 1951-1980, which was approximately 14 degrees Celsius (approximately 57 degrees Farenheit). So let’s plot the GISTEMP LOTI NH and SH data and see what we have.

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