A near fundamental decadal data record of airs infrared surface brightness temperatures

Aqua provides a direct measurement of the surface infrared radiation for a near decade (2003-2011) from a single satellite platform with two completely independent instruments (AIRS and MODIS). We produced a 0.5°×1.0° lat-lon daily gridded near fundamental decadal data record (FDDR) of AIRS all sky brightness temperatures (BT) for all 2378 AIRS channels including the 4μ and 12μ surface windows for the 9-year period. We show (i) that decadal difference trends between the spectrally convolved AIRS and MODIS IR surface channels 3.96μ, 4.05μ and 12.03μ are as small as 0.01K, 0.016K and 0.001K per year respectively, suitable to detect year to year decadal trends of AIRS global surface BTs as small as 0.1K over the decade. (ii) The analysis of gridded AIRS surface BT channel 4.16μ and 12.18μ reveals no global annual warming trend between 2003-2011 and negligible trends for both hemispheres in the 9-year period. (iii) Both AIRS channels 4.16μ and 12.18μ show a statistically significant global annual BT warming trend of 0.6K and 0.87K respectively in the Arctic (60N-90N) with yearly changes varying by as much as 1.6K. (iv) Finally, we show that AIRS global surface BT spectral channel 4.16μ has a correlation with annual, seasonal and monthly GISS global station surface temperature data records 0.96, 0.9, 0.82 respectively. We conjecture that direct satellite level 1B AIRS IR radiance sounding observations constitute a FDDR and that well calibrated IR surface BTs can serve as a surrogate for directly observing global climate surface temperatures.