Global warming deduced from MSU

Abstract

Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) radiometer observations in Channel 2 (53.74 GHz) made from sequential, sun-synchronous, polar-orbiting NOAA operational satellites have been used to derive global temperature trend for the period 1980 to 1996. Christy et al. (1998) emphasize that they find a tropospheric cooling trend (-0.046 K decade(-1)) from 1979 to 1997 with these MSU data, although their analysis of near nadir measurements yields a near zero trend (0.003 K decade(-1)). Using an independent method to analyze the MSU Ch 2 nadir data separately over global ocean and land, we infer that the temperature trends over both these regions are about 0.11 K decade(-1), during the period 1980 to 1996. This result is in better agreement with trend analyses based on conventional surface data.