Met Office Global Datasets

The Met Office maintain many important, observation-based datasets that cover the whole world, not just the UK. Many distributed via https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/.

The HadCRUT4 global dataset (Source). Dataset coverage, and accuracy, depend on having observations.

The upper-air and sub-surface ocean datasets are out of scope here, the others fall mostly into two categories:

• Marine datasets (e.g. HadSST, HadISST) using the data in ICOADS.
• Gridded land temperatures (e.g. HadEX2, HadGHCND) using international datasets derived from observations.

Maintaining and improving these datasets provides a strong justification for additional digitisation of ship observations, as well as support for international datasets development.