We're guessing that the above is not what readers were looking for in the first Global Mean Temperature report but we certainly have found this an interesting experience.
Moving on to the first month's temperature track:
Clicking on the thumbnail will open a full sized graphic (in a new window, if your browser setting permits it.)
Gaps in the track indicate hours where 1% or more of stations were not retrieved (usually in the small hours of the morning, my local time, as my service provider performed "upgrades") and the derived temperature was therefore omitted.
Points of interest so far include:
The predicted oscillation according to landmass and reporting location is quite apparent.
The prediction of derived temperature increment during the Northern Hemisphere Spring Season is holding - so far.
Some readers have expressed surprise (and some outright alarm) over the apparent volatility of our derived temperatures. Some of this is an artefact of reporting station location and some due to the nocturnal/diurnal effect on the concentration of landmass. Note also that this effect would be greatly accentuated were it not for genuine "greenhouse effect" because the hemisphere in planet shadow would cool so much more rapidly, winds would be horrific as the temperature differential between day and night hemispheres would be much greater and Earth would generally be a much less pleasant place going through a freeze/thaw cycle every 24 hours.
In summary, since temperatures are heavily influenced by solar radiation (down to the nocturnal/diurnal cycle, not to mention seasons), weather events (Polar breakouts, broad shading from large cloud formations...), geological events (explosive volcanic events), a plethora of interacting oscillations in various phases (ENSO, PDO, NAO, AO...) and even shading from bush fire smoke plumes we do not anticipate "stable" temperatures. We suspect some readers have been fooled by the breathless press reports of some month or year being n parts of a degree warmer/cooler than anticipated. Such reports bear little relation to the real or perceived world but are the product of highly processed data as we accumulate numbers, adjust them to ostensibly make highly corrupted urban measures reflect rural temperatures (often not collected anymore), fit arbitrary "norms" (get rid of the actual numbers by subtracting a figure representing averaged recordings, averaged over that month/season, averaged over some number of years) and thus end up with a statistical ± something. The planet's actual temperature, however, does not behave as the smoothed norms generated by statistics packages but is volatile and in constant flux, at any given moment either warmer or cooler than the moment preceding but highly unlikely to be exactly the same at two consecutive "snapshot" measures.
What's the global mean temperature? This looks about right:
