An invited review by Prof. Philip JONES, a CAS President's International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) Awardee, was published at Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (AAS) with Open Access on 8 Jan, 2016. 

His review concluded that surface temperature records, produced by four different groups, are in very good agreement with one another (the four datasets are HadCRUT4, NCEI/NOAA, GISS/NASA and BEST). And he further discussed the reliability of the series from the perspective of global and hemispheric averages and concluded that the most important issues with the basic land and marine data are (in order of importance) are (1) biases in sea surface temperatures, (2) exposure of land-based temperatures before the introduction of screens and (3) possible urbanization effects in recent decades. 

The review is an important contribution to the existing literature and is instrumental to using dataset in climate research. It can be downloaded at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-015-5194-4 (no paywall). 

Prof. JONES is the Research Director of Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, UK. He is well-known for developing global datasets of surface temperatures, precipitation and pressure, etc., which are kept and updated monthly at CRU and widely applied in a variety of research activities worldwide. He is recognized as one of the top 0.5% of highly-cited researchers in the geo-sciences by the ISI (the institute in the US that maintains the Web of Science).  Prof. JONES was awarded CAS PIFI Professorship in 2015.  During his two-week work at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) in June 2015, he accepted the invitation from Prof. ZHU Jiang, the Editor-in-Chief of AAS, also the General Director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, to contribute a review to AAS.  

Background:

The PIFI program is to support highly-qualified international scientists and postgraduate students to work and study at CAS institutions and strengthen their scientific collaboration with CAS researchers. The PIFI program is available for four categories of international researchers and students: distinguished scientists, visiting scientists, postdoctoral researchers and international PhD students. Recommended by IAP, Prof. Jones was selected to be the awardee of Category A: PIFI for Distinguished Scientists.