All official European Union website addresses are in the europa.eu domain.
See all EU institutions and bodiesDo something for our planet, print this page only if needed. Even a small action can make an enormous difference when millions of people do it!
Indicator Specification
Near-surface air temperature gives one of the clearest signals of global and regional climate change. Anthropogenic influence, mainly through emissions of greenhouse gases, is responsible for most of the observed increase in global mean temperature (GMT) in recent decades. For these reasons, GMT has been chosen as the indicator to monitor the 'ultimate objective' of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Rising mean temperatures are also increasing the frequency and severity of heatwaves globally and in Europe.
This indicator shows observed and projected changes in annual average near-surface temperature globally and for Europe. Europe is defined here as the land area in the range 34° to 72° northern latitude and -25° to 45° eastern longitude.
Temperature anomalies are presented relative to a ‘pre-industrial’ period between 1850 and 1899 (the beginning of instrumental temperature records). During this period, greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution are considered to have had a relatively small influence on the global climate compared with natural influences.
Time series of global and European land temperatures in Figure 1 are provided both as annual values (top) and as decadal averages (bottom).
The units used in this indicator are degrees Celsius (°C) and degrees Celsius per decade (°C/decade).
Temperature anomalies are presented relative to a ‘pre-industrial’ period between 1850 and 1899 (the beginning of instrumental temperature records).
The Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015 defines the long-term goal to 'hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change’ (UNFCCC, 2016). The need to limit the increase in GMT in accordance with the goals of the UNFCCC is also recognised in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and in Goal 13 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development (UNDRR, 2015; UN, 2015).
-
No related policy documents have been specified
The following global meteorological datasets have been used to compute the time series of global mean temperature and European land temperature:
The temperature anomalies from the original datasets were adjusted here to the ‘pre-industrial’ period between 1850 and 1899.
Spatially explicit temperature trends in Europe are derived from E-OBS v20.0e (Cornes et al., 2018). E-OBS is a daily gridded observational data set for precipitation, temperature and sea level pressure in Europe based on ECA&D information. The ECA&D project maintained by KNMI has collected homogeneous, long-term daily climate information from about 200 meteorological stations in most countries of Europe and parts of the Middle East. The dataset covers the period from 1950 on. Trends are calculated using a median of pairwise slopes algorithm.
The projected changes in European near-surface air temperature (°C) are based on the multi-model ensemble average of RCM simulations from the EURO-CORDEX initiative (Jacob et al., 2013). EURO-CORDEX is the European branch of the CORDEX initiative, a programme sponsored by the World Climate Research Program (WRCP) to produce improved regional climate change projections for all land regions worldwide.
Further information on all these datasets is available from the cited publications.
-
No methodology references available.
-
-
-
Work specified here requires to be completed within 1 year from now.
Work specified here will require more than 1 year (from now) to be completed.
For references, please go to https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/global-and-european-temperature-10 or scan the QR code.
PDF generated on 18 Apr 2024, 05:20 AM
Engineered by: EEA Web Team
Software updated on 26 September 2023 08:13 from version 23.8.18
Software version: EEA Plone KGS 23.9.14
Document Actions
Share with others