P. D. Jones

University of East Anglia | UEA · Climatic Research Unit

Tracking the energy balance of the Earth system is a key method for studying the contribution of human activities to climate change. However, accurately estimating the surface energy balance has long been a challenge, primarily due to uncertainties that dwarf the energy flux changes induced and a lack of precise observational data at the surface. W...

Information from a variety of sources has suggested that increased storminess was experienced across the British Isles in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. However, it is not clear how stormy that period was relative to current conditions. Using newly recovered barometric pressure data that extend back to 1748 we have constructed a meas...

Exposure biases are a pervasive non‐climatic change in land air temperature records which have been introduced as a result of changes in the way thermometers were sheltered from solar radiation and the elements over time. Exposure biases have not been widely accounted for in observational records, due to difficulties detecting/correcting the bias u...

A maximum temperature of 48.8°C (119.8°F) was purportedly recorded for the automated station in Siracusa (Syracuse) Contrada Monasteri, on the island of Sicilia (Sicily) Italy on August 11, 2021. A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) ad hoc evaluation committee was assembled to assess the possibility that the Sicilia temperature was the highest...

The construction of sub‐daily pressure series is described for the cities of London (GB) and Paris (FR). The series extend back 1692 and 1748, respectively, and as such they represent two of the longest sub‐daily series of barometric pressure available. These series are updated from the previously documented London and Paris daily series and offer...

Information from a variety of sources has suggested that an increased rate of storminess was experienced across the British Isles in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. However, it is not clear how stormy that period was relative to current conditions. Using newly recovered barometric pressure data that extend back to 1748 we show here th...

As IPCC ARs stated, global warming is estimated based on the average from 1850 to 1900 (global average temperature of preindustrialization estimated from relatively sparse observations). Given the impossibility of massive increasing observation data in the early stages, accurately constraining this baseline has become an unresolved issue. Here we d...

There is a growing need for past weather and climate data to support science and decision-making. This paper describes the compilation and construction of a global multivariable (air temperature, pressure, precipitation sum, number of precipitation days) monthly instrumental climate database that encompasses a substantial body of the known early in...

A series of daily atmospheric flow over the British Isles (the Lamb weather types, LWT) is used to detect possible relationship in winters of the 20th century with the aa index, a proxy of solar activity, and the quasi-biennial oscillation of stratospheric winds (QBO). Our aim is to address different methodological flawns impairing the conclusions...

Global surface temperature observational datasets are the basis of global warming studies. In the context of increasing global warming and frequent extreme events, it is essential to improve the coverage and reduce the uncertainty in global surface temperature datasets. The China global Merged Surface Temperature Interim version (CMST-Interim) is u...

The World Meteorological Organization verifies and documents record-setting temperatures, winds, lightning, and more, offering snapshots of Earth’s extremes and hints about its changing climate.

Global warming exhibits distinct differences at continental scales, yet whether models capture these differences is unclear. Here, we show that Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 climate models underestimate warming unevenness for China and the United States, possibly leading to a biased estimation of anthropogenic influence on warming...

Global surface temperature observational datasets are the basis of global warming studies. In the context of increasing global warming and frequent extreme events, it is essential to improve the coverage and reduce the uncertainty of global surface temperature datasets. The China global Merged Surface Temperature Interim version (CMST-Interim) is u...

Abstract Previous studies show that the environment in the Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao region (GHMR) is under the double stress of global warming and urbanization. Here we show that due to the increase of regional greenness, the effect of urbanization warming on surface air temperature (SAT) decreased with time and became statistically insignif...

Ascension Island has had a long intermittent record of instrumental weather recording. Here, we develop monthly records of mean temperature and precipitation totals (for 1924–2020 when an almost complete record is available) from the three principal recording sites: the capital Georgetown and two gauges at Wideawake Airfield. Although some of the d...

Two reports of Antarctic Region potential new record high temperature observations (18.3°C, 6 February 2020 at Esperanza station and 20.8°C, 9 February 2020 at a Brazilian automated permafrost monitoring station on Seymour Island) were evaluated by a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) panel of atmospheric scientists. The latter figure was repo...

Century-long continuous daily observations from some stations are important for the study of long-term trends and extreme climate events in the past. In this paper, three daily data sources – (1) the Department of Industry Agency of the British Concession in Tianjin covering 1 September 1890–31 December 1931, (2) the Water Conservancy Commission of...

According to the characteristics of forced and unforced components to climate change, sophisticated statistical models were used to fit and separate multiple scale variations in the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) series. These include a combined model of the Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIM...

We present a new version of the Met Office Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit global surface temperature data set, HadCRUT5. HadCRUT5 presents monthly average near‐surface temperature anomalies, relative to the 1961–1990 period, on a regular 5° latitude by 5° longitude grid from 1850 to 2018. HadCRUT5 is a combination of sea‐surface temperature (...

The century-long continuous daily observations from some stations are important for the study of long-term trends and extreme climate events in the past. In this paper, three daily data sources: (1) Department of Industry Agency of British Concession in Tianjin covering Sep 1 1890–Dec 31 1931 (2) Water Conservancy Commission of North China covering...

Climatic Research Unit temperature version 5 (CRUTEM5) is an extensive revision of our land surface air temperature data set. We have expanded the underlying compilation of monthly temperature records from 5,583 to 10,639 stations, of which those with sufficient data to be used in the gridded data set has grown from 4,842 to 7,983. Many station rec...

Based on C-LSAT2.0, using high- and low-frequency components reconstruction methods, combined with observation constraint masking, a set of reconstructed C-LSAT2.0 with 756 ensemble members from 1850s to 2018 has been developed. These ensemble versions have been merged with the ERSSTv5 ensemble dataset, and an upgraded version of the CMST-Interim d...

Past versions of global surface temperature (ST) datasets have been shown to have underestimated the recent warming trend over 1998-2012. This study uses a newly updated global land surface air temperature and a land and marine surface temperature dataset, referred to as China global Land Surface Air Temperature (C-LSAT) and China Merged Surface Te...

The performance of a new historical reanalysis, the NOAA-CIRES-DOE 20 th Century Reanalysis Version 3 (20CRv3), is evaluated via comparisons with other reanalyses and independent observations. This dataset provides global, 3-hourly estimates of the atmosphere from 1806 to 2015 by assimilating only surface pressure observations and prescribing sea s...

Plain Language Summary The Guangdong‐Hong Kong‐Macau region (GHMR), especially the Greater Bay Area (GBA), is a region typical of China's economic development and rapid urbanization. To precisely assess how much the urbanization contributes to the regional warming, we comprehensively evaluate the urbanization warming and its uncertainties in GHMR b...

A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Extremes Evaluation Committee investigated an observation of −69.6 °C by Klinck Automatic Weather Station (AWS) in Greenland on 22 December 1991 as the lowest temperature observed in Greenland, thereby making it the lowest recorded near‐surface air temperature for the Northern and Western Hemispheres and fo...

Indonesian peatlands are critical to the global carbon cycle, but they also support a large number of local economies. Intense forest clearing and draining in these peatlands is causing severe ecological and environmental impacts. Most studies highlighted increased carbon emission in the region through drought and large‐scale fires, further acceler...

Significance The SADA is an annually-resolved hydroclimate atlas in South America that spans the continent south of 12°S from 1400 to 2000 CE. Based on 286 tree ring records and instrumentally-based estimates of soil moisture, the SADA complements six drought atlases worldwide filling a geographical gap in the Southern Hemisphere. Independently val...

The consistency of the current GLSAT and GMST warming trends after 1880 is found to be further strengthened. It is generally believed that long-term GMST changes can be divided into the external “signals” and the internal “noise”. Obviously, of the two most important EOF eigenvectors of GMST changes, the 1st mode is undoubtedly controlled by extern...

CRU TS (Climatic Research Unit gridded Time Series) is a widely used climate dataset on a 0.5° latitude by 0.5° longitude grid over all land domains of the world except Antarctica. It is derived by the interpolation of monthly climate anomalies from extensive networks of weather station observations. Here we describe the construction of a major new...

A global inventory of early instrumental meteorological measurements is compiled that comprises thousands of mostly nondigitized series, pointing to the potential of weather data rescue.

In this study, we have developed a global in situ daily precipitation dataset based on quasi‐real‐time sub‐daily observations of precipitation totals for the 0000–0000 UTC (Co‐ordinated Universal Time) day everywhere in the world. The sub‐daily precipitation data from meteorological stations are obtained via the World Meteorological Organization's...

Changes in climate can be favorable as well as detrimental for natural and anthropogenic systems. Temperatures in Central Asia have risen significantly within the last decades whereas mean precipitation remains almost unchanged. However, climatic trends can vary greatly between different subregions, across altitudinal levels, and within seasons. In...

39 40 Although there are still slight differences during some periods, the global surface 41 air temperature (SAT) change series developed by different groups are generally very 42 consistent with each other. However, there are still considerable uncertainties in the 43 analysis of air temperature series at the regional scale. At the slightly large...

Changes in climate can be favorable as well as detrimental for natural and anthropogenic systems. Temperatures in Central Asia have risen significantly within the last decades whereas mean precipitation remains almost unchanged. However, climatic trends can vary greatly between different subregions, across altitudinal levels, and within seasons. In...

Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated “early instrumental data.” They have played an important role in climate research as they allow daily to decadal variability and changes of temperature, pressure, and precipitation, including extremes, to be addressed. Early instrume...

Historical reanalyses that span more than a century are needed for a wide range of studies, from understanding large‐scale climate trends to diagnosing the impacts of individual historical extreme weather events. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) Project is an effort to fill this need. It is supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric A...

Globally, few precipitation records extend to the 18th century. The England Wales Precipitation (EWP) series is a notable exception with continuous monthly records from 1766. EWP has found widespread use across diverse fields of research including trend detection, evaluation of climate model simulations, as a proxy for mid‐latitude atmospheric circ...

Seasonal prediction of extreme precipitation has long been a challenge especially for the East Asian Summer Monsoon region, where extreme rains are often disastrous for the human society and economy. This paper introduces a decision‐tree (DT) method for predicting extreme precipitation in the rainy season over South China in April–June (SC‐AMJ) and...

The Lamb weather type series is a subjective catalogue of daily atmospheric patterns and flow directions over the British Isles, covering the period 1861–1996. Based on synoptic maps, meteorologists have empirically classified surface pressure patterns over this area, which is a key area for the progression of Atlantic storm tracks towards Europe....

Precipitation on the Spanish mainland and in the Balearic archipelago exhibits a high degree of spatial and temporal variability, regardless of the temporal resolution of the data considered. The fractal dimension indicates the property of self-similarity, and in the case of this study, wherein it is applied to the temporal behaviour of rainfall at...

The Amundsen Sea Low (ASL) plays a major role in the climate and environment of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, including surface air temperature and sea ice concentration changes. Unfortunately, a relative dearth of observational data across the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas prior to the satellite era (post-1979) limits our understanding of...

Sub-daily meteorological observations are needed for input to and assessment of high-resolution reanalysis products to improve understanding of weather and climate variability. While there are millions of such weather observations that have been collected by various organisations, many are yet to be transcribed into a useable format. Under the ausp...

The EU Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) European Climatic Energy Mixes (ECEM) has produced, in close collaboration with prospective users, a proof-of-concept climate service, or Demonstrator, designed to enable the energy industry and policy makers assess how well different energy supply mixes in Europe will meet demand, over different time...

We describe the construction of a new version of the Europe‐wide E‐OBS temperature (daily minimum, mean and maximum values) and precipitation dataset. This version provides an improved estimation of interpolation uncertainty through the calculation of a 100‐member ensemble of realizations of each daily field. The dataset covers the period back to 1...

A set of homogenized monthly mean surface air temperature (SAT) series at 32 stations in China back to the 19th century had previously been developed based on the RHtest method by Cao et al., but some inhomogeneities remained in the dataset. The present study produces a further-adjusted and updated dataset based on the Multiple Analysis of Series f...

In 2017, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth's atmosphere-carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide-reached new record highs. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth's surface for 2017 was 405.0 ± 0.1 ppm, 2.2 ppm greater than for 2016 and the highest in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice cor...

Keith R. Briffa was one of the most influential palaeoclimatologists of the last 30 years. His primary research interests lay in Late-Holocene climate change with a geographical emphasis on northern Eurasia. His greatest impact was in the field of dendroclimatology, a field that he helped to shape. His contributions have been seminal to the develop...

Quantitative approaches to climate risk management such as mapping or impact modelling rely on past meteorological data with daily or sub‐daily resolution, a large fraction of which have not yet been digitized. Over the last decade or so, a number of projects have contributed to the rescue of some of these data. Here we provide a summary of a surve...

Sub-daily meteorological observations are needed for input to and assessment of high-resolution reanalysis products to improve understanding of weather and climate variability. While there are millions such weather observations that have been collected by various organizations, many are yet to be transcribed into a useable format. Under the auspice...

A new dataset of integrated and homogenized monthly surface air temperature over global land for the period since 1900 (China Meteorological Administration global Land Surface Air Temperature (CMA-LSAT)) is developed. In total, 14 sources have been collected and integrated into the newly developed dataset, including three global (CRUTEM4, GHCN, and...

The Amundsen Sea Low (ASL) plays a major role in the climate and environment of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, including surface air temperature and sea ice concentration changes. Unfortunately, a relative dearth of observational data across the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas prior to the satellite era (post-1979) limits our understanding of...

There is overwhelming evidence that the climate system has warmed since the instigation of instrumental meteorological observations. The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the evidence for warming was unequivocal. However, owing to imperfect measurements and ubiquitous changes in measurement netw...

Using state-of-the-art observational datasets and results from a large archive of computer model simulations, a consortium of scientists from 12 different institutions has resolved a long-standing conundrum in climate science—the apparent discrepancy between simulated and observed temperature trends in the tropics. Research published by this group...