HatCRUT3 is the global temperature Index of the U.K. Hadley Metoffice.

In another post, I will attempt to combine the 3 land-ocean indices of GISStemp, HadCRUT3 and NCDC in one graph with 1900-2000 as the 20th century reference period, because there seems to be a bit of a confusion regarding the different developments of the temperature networks.

Here are the temperature anomalies for the 3 surface temperature networks for the first quarter 2008 compared to the 20th century average.

                            GISStemp   HatCRUT3  NCDC

January                   0.13              0.19           0.20

February                 0.27              0.32           0.38

March                     0.68              0.56           0.70

1st Quarter 2008    0.36              0.36           0.43

The hypothesis of “the great pacific climate shift” having occured around 1976-1978, which lead to a big junk of the warming of the eighties, can be read here. In a later post, I like us to also discuss why when looking at the temperature history graphs of the various networks, some graphs make believe that the warming will continue, others don’t.

For a comparison between surface stations and mid tropospheric satelite measurements, see this graph by noaa.

The climate research unit informs here that the dataset HatCRUT2 was replaced by HatCRUT3 from January 2006. The old version which will not be updated anymore can be viewed here. I hope this helps for now.