UAH satellite temperature record

The UAH satellite temperature record is a dataset developed by Drs. John R. Christy and Roy W. Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and based on the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) lower tropospheric temperature records (MSU 2LT). Christy and Spencer used it in publishing "a series of papers starting about 1990 that implied the troposphere was warming at a much slower rate than the surface temperature record and climate models indicated..." , which made their dataset "an icon for global warming skeptics". But the discrepancy turned out to be an artifact of their having applied incorrect adjustments to the data. As Ray Pierrehumbert at RealClimate put it: "Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done "

Related SourceWatch articles

 * John R. Christy
 * Roy W. Spencer
 * University of Alabama at Huntsville