The study evaluates global and regional land surface temperature rate of change in the past decades, using MODIS remote sensing data and ECMWF ERA5-Land reanalysis data, both with fine resolution and global coverage. Warming trends were examined in global, continental, and pixel scales with p-values for significance. The results indicate that continents and large regions were warming at substantially different rates, with the Arctic, Europe, and Russia being the fastest warming regions around the globe. In addition, with ERA5-Land data, comparison between temperature change rates of different time periods reveals that the warming rates in the Arctic and in most of the continents were accelerating during the 40-yr period 1981-2020.
Geographically, the fastest warming land (a and b) on Earth during 2001-2020 was found to coincide, in general, with the regions of Arctic permafrost (c) and tundra biota (d) in the circumpolar regions. The very high warming rates signal the acceleration of Arctic permafrost thaw and thus the deterioration of climate change in the onset of the 21st century.
The paper can be read from the journal website.
You-Ren Wang, Dag O. Hessen, Bjørn H. Samset, Frode Stordal, Evaluating global and regional land warming trends in the past decades with both MODIS and ERA5-Land land surface temperature data, Remote Sensing of Environment, 280, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2022.113181