zlacker

>>gmays+(OP)
What the devil does unofficial mean? Is there a world's hottest day governing body?

Or is it like boxing and there are multiple governing bodies and Tuesday captured the WBO hottest day, but the IBF and WBC still recognize August 1, 2022?

>>JackFr+w7
This unofficial number comes from a climate model published by the University of Maine as opposed to one created by a government agency or the WMO. Several agencies have their own climate models so “official” is very vague.

Generally in the US “official” numbers would come from the NOAA and the NCEI would be the one publishing them.

>>akisel+1d
So it’s a bunch of models?

>>spookt+Fi
The goal is to estimate an "average temperature" for Earth. What does that even mean? Are we talking about the temperature of the ground, the temperature of air at 2 m above the surface, the temperature of the Earth 100 m above the surface? In this case it's something like the second example: 2 m above the surface.

How do you ideally compute this average? You take the simultaneous temperature measurement at every point on Earth and take the average. Obviously that is not possible.

What do you do instead? You put together temperature readings where they exist, satellite data, coupled with past data and behaviors to make an estimate for the average temperature. How else could you possibly do it.