By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With that

The global surface temperature anomaly data from the UK Hadley Climate Research Unit has just been released, and it shows a significant drop in the global temperature anomaly in January 2008, to just 0.034C, just slightly above zero. This caps a full year of temperature drop from HadCRUT’s January 2007 value of 0.632C.

See larger image here.

The change in temperature for the year then is 0.595C which is in line with other respected global temperature metrics that I have reported on in the past two weeks.  RSS, UAH, and GISS global temperature sets all show sharp drops in the last year. We are in an extended solar minimum, we have a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to a cold state, and we are seeing arctic ice extents setting new records and rebounding from the summer melt. While weather is defined as such variability, the fact that so many things are in agreement on a global scale in such a short time span of one year should give us pause. See Anthony’s blog here.

Icecap Note: You have access to all the data sources in our Climate Library Resource section with this link.