GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
Sources
Source code and documentation for the GISTEMP software is available on this site. The programs are intended for installation and use on a computer with a Unix-like operating system.
- Download gistemp4.0.tar.gz.
This archive is approximately 80 KB. Updates to the code and to the archive are noted, when they occur, in the updates to analysis.
Once you have gunzipped and de-tarred the archive, you will have a directory containing a text version of the documentation in the sub-directory doc; it also contains a README_steps.md file that explains how to build and run the analysis.
The software will download the necessary input files and put them in the appropriate place. However, it is possible that you may encounter a download error if your Python and/or OpenSSL installations do not sufficiently support HTTPS. If so, you may download input.tar.gz and place its files into the directory
- gistemp4.0/tmp/input
We also make available the night light satellite data (about 42.4 MB) we obtained from Marc L. Imhoff and that we used to determine the brightness index for the various weather stations.
- Download wrld-radiance.tar.
The text file below lists the data that are not used, mostly the beginning of a station record that seems inconsistent with the later data. In a few cases the whole record is disregarded.
- Download discarded data.
Ocean data
The ocean data may be obtained from NOAA as text or netcdf files. To speed up the processing of these data, we convert them to fortran binary files, each starting with an 80-character title and followed by a 180x89 real*4 array of data; the fortran statements "open(1,file=filename,form='unformatted)", "read(1) title,array" (or "write(1) title,array" to create them) will process these files. Make sure that columns 41:44 of the title contain the year, 46:47 the month of the data file. The script updateERSST.sh will execute the two steps described below.
1 - Masking and regridding
Only open ocean data will be used, so data in grid boxes containing lakes or sea ice will be disregarded. The mask Open Ocean Mask is used. It only depends on the calendar month (season) but is the same for each year. The program MaskRegrid.f expects the input files to reside in the subdirectory input_files; the command line arguments are first year and month and last year and month to be processed. The output file is a time series of maps on the equal area grid.
2 - Rearranging
The program rearrange.ERSST.f creates the file "SBBX.ERSST.upd" from scratch if year1=1880 and month1=1 or else as an update of "input_files/SBBX.ERSSTv5". Finally, time series starting and/or ending with missing data are shortenend using the program trimSBBX.f to create the new/updated SBBX.ERSSTv5.
