Researchers have confirmed strong warming in the upper troposphere, known colloquially as the tropospheric hotspot, long expected as part of the global warming hypothesis.
Though the tropospheric hotspot appears in many global climate models, the inability to detect it has been used to suggest climate change is not occurring as a result of increasing carbon dioxide emissions.
The discovery was made by extending an existing data record and removing artifacts caused by station moves and instrument changes. This revealed real changes in temperature as opposed to the artificial changes generated by alterations to the way the data was collected. No climate models were used in the process that revealed the tropospheric hotspot. The researchers instead used observations and combined two well-known techniques linear regression and Iterative Universal Kriging.