Researchers have found that the world is indeed getting warmer, but historical records show that it hasn't happened everywhere at the same rate.
Zhaohua Wu, an assistant professor of meteorology at Florida State University, said global warming was not as understood as they thought.
Wu led a team of climate researchers including Fei Ji, a visiting doctoral student at FSU's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS); Eric Chassignet, director of COAPS; and Jianping Huang, dean of the College of Atmospheric Sciences at Lanzhou University in China.
The group, using an analysis method newly developed by Wu and his colleagues, examined land surface temperature trends from 1900 onward for the entire globe, minus Antarctica.
The research team found that noticeable warming first started around the regions circling the Arctic and subtropical regions in both hemispheres. But the largest accumulated warming to date is actually at the northern midlatitudes.
They also found that in some areas of the world, cooling had actually occurred.
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Chassignet said that the global warming is not uniform and that there are areas that have cooled and areas that have warmed.
The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.