NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Global surface skin temperature has been retrieved from MetOp IASI ultraspectral infrared measurements over the past 13+ years. Monthly and spatially gridded surface skin temperature is produced to show some phenomena associated with its natural variability. This article has aimed to demonstrate that thermal infrared remote sensing data can be used for monitoring global surface environmental characteristics and associated change through the continuity observations of MetOp series. The timeseries anomalies of surface skin temperature are used to estimate its associated trend. Error estimation and evaluation has been performed and discussed in order to understand the uncertainty and variability in the trends. The trends derived from IASI global surface skin temperatures are compared with those of the NASA GISS global surface air temperature. Despite the physical differences between surface skin and air temperatures, reasonable agreement is shown between these two datasets indicating consistency and global surface warming, achieving our core objective of investigating the surface skin temperature retrieved from MetOp satellites’ measurements and associated trends. The inferred trend of IASI global surface skin temperature illustrates an approximate 0.037±0.002 K/yr. global average increase has occurred during the September 2007—present (November 2020) time period; this warming trend is more pronounced in the northern hemisphere.