About

A desk of published measurements.

Instrument Record is a stand-alone observational site. Each category is one question: how do the thermometers compare, where is CO₂, what are the two sea-level instruments doing, is this year’s ice cycle running low, where is the Sun, and how thin is the Holocene on the official clock.

How to read it

  • Measurements first. Model output is not ingested here.
  • Geological and Holocene context sit next to the satellite era.
  • Product disagreement is drawn, not averaged away: UAH, RSS, HadCRUT, GISS.
  • Smoothing and reference periods are controls. Native zeros differ; say so.
  • Raw and smoothed traces are always one click apart.

What is on the desk

Temperature products, Mauna Loa and Law Dome CO₂, ocean/Niño, sea-level instrument classes, sea ice and snow, the solar cycle, the ICS timescale, and ice-core paleoclimate — plus the methods that make those plots comparable.

On interpretation

The charts do not argue a single attribution. They keep the comparisons inspectable, label schematic series as schematic, and use published observational files (UAH, RSS, HadCRUT5, GISTEMP, NOAA GML, SILSO, NSIDC, Rutgers, CPC ONI, ICS, ice-core compilations) wherever they were reachable.

Data and papers

Download every series as CSV, or open Sources for agency links and DOIs.

Further reading

A long-running observational compilation covering many of the same archives is climate4you.com (Ole Humlum). Instrument Record is not a mirror of that site and is not affiliated with it.

Data compiled 2026 from the agencies named on each panel.

Companion desks

Same project, other questions.

They are not extra series on these charts — they are the arguments about ice versus stomata, the 20th-century blade, the ¹³C fingerprint, the 1988 polar forecasts, and what CERES actually attributes the last 26 years to.