Improvements to the Land Surface Air Temperature Reconstruction in NOAAGlobalTemp: An Artificial Neural Network Approach

Abstract

NOAAGlobalTemp is NOAA’s operational global surface temperature product, which has been widely used in the Earth’s climate assessment and monitoring. To improve the spatial interpolation of monthly land surface air temperatures (LSATs) in NOAAGlobalTemp from 1850 to 2020, a three-layer artificial neural network (ANN) system was designed. The ANN system was trained by repeatedly randomly selecting 90% of the LSATs from ERA5 (1950–2019) and validating with the remaining 10%. Validations show clear improvements of ANN over the original empirical orthogonal teleconnection (EOT) method: The global spatial correlation coefficient (SCC) increases from 65% to 80%, and the global root-mean-square-difference (RMSD) decreases from 0.99°C to 0.57°C during 1850–2020. The improvements of SCCs and RMSDs are larger in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) than in the Northern Hemisphere (NH), and are larger before the 1950s and where observations are sparse. The ANN system was finally fed in observed LSATs, and its output over the global land surface was compared with those from the EOT method. Comparisons demonstrate similar improvements by ANN over the EOT method: The global SCC increased from 78% to 89%, the global RMSD decreased from 0.93°C to 0.68°C, and the LSAT variability quantified by the monthly standard deviation (STD) increases from 1.16°C to 1.41°C during 1850–2020. While the SCC, RMSD, and STD at the monthly timescale have been improved, long-term trends remain largely unchanged because the low-frequency component of LSAT in ANN is identical to that in the EOT approach.