CRUTEM is a dataset derived from air temperatures near to the land surface recorded at weather stations across all continents of Earth. It has been developed and maintained by the Climatic Research Unit since the early 1980s, with funding provided mostly by the US Department of Energy. The lead scientist for most of this work was Professor Phil Jones, though many colleagues have also contributed. In recent years, the Met Office Hadley Centre (MOHC) have also been involved, especially in the regular updating of the operational version of CRUTEM (current version CRUTEM3). CRUTEM has been combined with the MOHC's dataset of sea surface temperatures to provide a near-global dataset of temperatures across Earth's surface, called HadCRUT. For example, the current version HadCRUT3 combines CRUTEM3 and HadSST2. These datasets have been widely used for assessing the possibility of anthropogenic climate change.
The ACRID project has focussed on publishing CRUTEM3, including the workflow from station data to gridded and global datasets, according to the linked-data method.
- The linked-data representation of CRUTEM3 is available at the ACRID Linked Workflows Server.
As an additional outcome of the ACRID project, we have also been able to assemble an archive of some earlier versions of CRUTEM.
- The earlier versions of CRUTEM are available at the CRUTEM archive webpage.