Surface Temperature of the Planet Earth from Satellite Data

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change regular scientific assessments of global warming is based on measurements of air temperature from weather stations, buoys or ships. More specifically, air temperature annual means are estimated from their integration into climate models, with some areas (Africa, Antarctica, seas) being clearly underrepresented. Present satellites allow estimation of surface temperature for a full coverage of our planet with a sub-daily revisit frequency and kilometric resolution. In this work, a simple methodology is developed that allows estimating the surface temperature of Planet Earth with MODIS Terra and Aqua land and sea surface temperature products, as if the whole planet was reduced to a single pixel. The results, through a completely independent methodology, corroborate the temperature anomalies retrieved from climate models and show a linear warming trend of 0.018 ± 0.007 °C/yr.