The UK Met Office has asked the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to create a new state-of-the art dataset of global land surface air temperatures for improved climate diagnostics.

Three independent temperature datasets are currently being maintained by the Met Office, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and by the US National Climatic Data Center. Each record is constructed on the basis of monthly average raw data from selected meteorological stations around the world, and all show similar magnitudes and rates of warming over the last century.

But the datasets are not flawless (biases can occur, for example, when stations are being relocated, or when instrumentation is exchanged) and their monthly resolution is too coarse for studies of fine-scale climate features such as changes in daily temperature extremes.

At a meeting in Antalya, Turkey, the WMO’s commission for climatology has endorsed the Met Office’s proposal of reanalyzing existing records and creating a refined global temperature dataset.

Read the full version of this story by Quirin Schiermeier on Nature’s Climate Feedback blog.