Washington: Researchers said that they have discovered "missing heat" in the climate system, which has cast doubt on suggestions that global warming has slowed or stopped over the past decade.
Observational data on which climate records are based cover only 84 percent of the planet - with Polar regions and some parts of Africa excluded.
Now, Dr Kevin Cowtan, a computational scientist at the University of York, and Robert Way, a cryosphere specialist and PhD student at the University of Ottawa, have reconstructed the 'missing' global temperatures using a combination of observations from satellites and surface data from weather stations and ships on the peripheries of the unsampled regions.
The new research shows that the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet.
The new research suggests that the addition of the 'missing' data indicates that the rate of warming since 1997 has been two and a half times greater than shown in the Met Office studies.
Evidence for the rapid warming of the Arctic includes observations from high latitude weather stations, radiosonde and satellite observations of temperatures in the lower atmosphere and reanalysis of historical data.
The research has been published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.
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