CRUTEM is a dataset derived from air temperatures near to the land surface recorded at weather stations across all continents of Earth. It has been developed and maintained by the Climatic Research Unit since the early 1980s, with funding provided mostly by the US Department of Energy. The lead scientist for most of this work was Professor Phil Jones, though many colleagues have also contributed. In recent years, the Met Office Hadley Centre (MOHC) have also been involved, especially in the regular updating of the operational version of CRUTEM (current version CRUTEM4). CRUTEM has been combined with the MOHC’s dataset of sea surface temperatures to provide a near-global dataset of temperatures across Earth’s surface, called HadCRUT. For example, the current version HadCRUT4 combines CRUTEM4 and HadSST3. These datasets have been widely used for assessing the possibility of anthropogenic climate change.