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Uncertainty in the bias adjustments applied to historical sea surface temperature (SST) measurements made using buckets are thought to make the largest contribution to uncertainty in global surface temperature trends. Measurements of the change in temperature of water samples in wooden and canvas buckets used before World War 2 are compared with the predictions of models that have been used to estimate bias adjustments applied in widely-used gridded analyses of SST. The results show that the models are broadly able to predict the dependence of the temperature change of the water over time on the thermal forcing and the bucket characteristics: volume and geometry; structure and material. However, assumptions inherent in the derivation of the models are likely to affect their applicability. We observed that the water sample needed to be fairly vigorously stirred to agree with results from the model, which assumes well-mixed conditions. There were inconsistences between the model results and previous measurements made in a wind tunnel in 1951. The model assumes non turbulent incident flow and consequently predicts an approximately square-root dependence on airflow speed. The wind tunnel measurements, taken over a wide range of airflows, showed a much stronger dependence. In the presence of turbulence the heat transfer will increase with the turbulent intensity: for measurements made on ships the incident airflow is likely to be turbulent and the intensity of the turbulence is always unknown. Taken together these uncertainties are expected to be substantial and may represent the limiting factor for the direct application of these models to adjust historical SST observations. However, both the models and the observations indicate that the most important parameter driving temperature biases in historical bucket measurements is the difference between the water temperature and the wet-bulb temperature. Solar radiation is also important, but not examined in this paper.

Drifting buoy sea-surface temperature (SST) records have been used to characterize the diurnal variability of ocean tem- perature at a depth of order 20 cm. We use measurements covering the period 1986–2012 from the International Com- prehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) version 2.5, which is a collection of marine surface observations that includes individual SST records from drifting buoys. Appropriately transformed, this dataset is well suited for estimation of the diurnal cycle, since many drifting buoys have high temporal coverage (many reports per day), and are globally distributed. For each drifter for each day, we compute the local-time daily SST variation relative to the local-time daily mean SST. Climatological estimates of subdaily SST variability are found by averaging across various strata of the data: in 10° latitudinal bands as well as globally; and stratified with respect to season, wind speed and cloud cover. A parame- terization of the diurnal variability is fitted as a function of the variables used to stratify the data, and the coefficients for this fit are also provided with the data. Results are consistent with expectations based on the previous work: the diurnal temperature cycle peaks in early afternoon (circa 2 pm local time); there is an increase in amplitude and a decrease in seasonality towards the equator. Generally, the ocean at this depth cools on windy days and warms on calm days, so that a component of subdaily variability is the SST tendency on slower timescales. By not ‘closing’ the diurnal cycle when stratified by environmental conditions, this dataset differs from previously published diurnal-cycle parameter- izations. This thorough characterization of the SST diurnal cycle will assist in interpreting SST observations made at different local times of day for climatological purposes, and in testing and constraining models of the diurnal-cycle and air-sea interaction at high temporal resolution.