Met Office plan new climate change monitoring scheme

The Met Office, as Britain’s representative on the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), has proposed a programme to deliver a new global temperature data set.

According to the service, which has been under fire for failing to predict snow storms this winter, the initiative will augment, not replace, current systems.

The data used for monitoring climate change has been under-fire since hacked emails were taken from the University of East Anglia.

A Met Office spokesman said: “The proposed data set will provide information on changing extremes and regional variability, and so strengthen decisions on adapting to climate change.

“This will require surface temperature data sets with more detail than the current monthly averaged temperatures.”

He also said the data ‘will be available at daily’ and use methods that are ‘fully peer reviewed and open to scrutiny’.

He added: “The new analysis will add to, and refine, the existing data sets which all show global and continental-scale multi-decadal trends of increasing temperatures.”

Luke Walsh