Arctic data shows global warming didn’t pause: Study

Missing Arctic temperature data created the seeming slowdown of global warming from 1998 to 2012, according to a study. Researchers at University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in the US constructed the first data set of surface temperatures from across the world that significantly improves representation of the Arctic during the “global warming hiatus.”

Xiangdong Zhang from UAF and colleagues at Tsinghua University in Beijing analysed temperature data collected from buoys drifting in the Arctic Ocean. “We recalculated the average global temperatures from 1998-2012 and found that the rate of global warming had continued to rise at 0.112 degrees Celsius per decade instead of slowing down to 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade as previously thought,” said Zhang.

The new data also improved estimates of the global warming and the Arctic warming rate. “We estimated a new rate of Arctic warming at 0.659 degrees Celsius per decade from 1998-2014. Compared with the newly estimated global warming rate of 0.130 degrees Celsius per decade, the Arctic has warmed more than five time the global average,” Zhang said in the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Most current estimates use global data that tend to represent a long-time span and provide good coverage of a global geographic area. However, the remote Arctic lacks a robust network of instruments to collect temperature data.