A global monthly land surface air temperature analysis for 1948–present

A station observation‐based global land monthly mean surface air temperature dataset at 0.5 × 0.5 latitude‐longitude resolution for the period from 1948 to the present was developed recently at the Climate Prediction Center, National Centers for Environmental Prediction. This data set is different from some existing surface air temperature data sets in: (1) using a combination of two large individual data sets of station observations collected from the Global Historical Climatology Network version 2 and the Climate Anomaly Monitoring System (GHCN + CAMS), so it can be regularly updated in near real time with plenty of stations and (2) some unique interpolation methods, such as the anomaly interpolation…