Climate monitoring and data sets

The Met Office Hadley Centre monitors a broad range of climate variables and indices. These are used worldwide for climate monitoring and climate modelling, and in studies of the causes of climate change.

Our work features prominently in many influential reports such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and the Stern review and also in prominent scientific papers.

The Met Office Hadley Centre makes the vast majority of its data sets freely available (for academic and personal use only). Commercial use is forbidden under the terms and conditions and commercial organisations should first contact the Met Office Customer Centre.

Further information and data are available from www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs

The red bars show the global annual average near-surface temperature anomalies from 1850 to 2009 for land areas only (top), ocean areas only (middle) and combined land and ocean (bottom). The error bars show the 95% uncertainty range on the annual averages. The thick blue line shows the annual values after smoothing with a 21-point binomial filter. The thin blue lines show the 95% uncertainty on the smoothed curve. Data are from the HadCRUT3 data set.

Climate change goes on. Average global temperatures are now some 0.75 °C warmer than they were 100 years ago and since the mid-1970s average global temperatures have increased at a rate of more than 0.15 °C per decade. Yet over the last 10 years temperatures have risen more slowly, causing some to claim that global warming has stopped. Here we explain why this is not the case and explains that observed changes are entirely consistent with our understanding of natural fluctuations of the climate within a trend of continuing long-term warming. The evidence is very clear that global temperatures are rising and that humans are largely responsible.