Long-term Global Warming Trend Continues

  • Released Friday, November 1, 2013

The world is getting warmer. This map shows global, annual temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2014 based on analysis conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Red and blue shades show how much warmer or cooler a given area was compared to an averaged base period from 1951 to 1980. The graph shows yearly, global GISS temperature anomaly data from 1880 to 2014. Though there are minor variations from year to year, the general trend shows rapid warming in the past few decades, with the last decade being the warmest. To conduct its analysis, GISS uses publicly available data from approximately 6300 meteorological stations around the world; ship-based and satellite observations of sea surface temperature; and Antarctic research station measurements. These three datasets are loaded into a computer analysis program that calculates trends in temperature anomalies relative to the annual average temperature from 1951 to 1980. Generally, warming is greater over land than over the oceans because water is slower to absorb and release heat. Warming may also differ substantially within specific landmasses and ocean basins.

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Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Release date

This page was originally published on Friday, November 1, 2013.
This page was last updated on Friday, August 2, 2024 at 6:06 PM EDT.


Datasets used

  • GISTEMP [GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP)]

    ID: 585
    Type: Model Sensor: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) Collected by: NASA/GISS Dates used: 1880 2013

    The GISS Surface Temperature Analysis version 4 (GISTEMP v4) is an estimate of global surface temperature change. Graphs and tables are updated around the middle of every month using current data files from NOAA GHCN v4 (meteorological stations) and ERSST v5 (ocean areas), combined as described in our publications Hansen et al. (2010) and Lenssen et al. (2019).

    Credit: Lenssen, N., G. Schmidt, J. Hansen, M. Menne, A. Persin, R. Ruedy, and D. Zyss, 2019: Improvements in the GISTEMP uncertainty model. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 124, no. 12, 6307-6326, doi:10.1029/2018JD029522.

    This dataset can be found at: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

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Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.