What is it about?
Measuring air temperature accurately can be difficult. If the thermometers used for this only respond slowly, the temperature changes will be smoothed out. This can mean that temperature extremes - for example the daily maximum or minimum temperature - might be missed entirely. In this experimental work, we investigated how quickly thermometers respond to temperature changes, using thermometers of diffferent sizes exposed in the familiar white slatted wooden boxes commonly seen at weather monitoring sites.
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Photo by Ilzar Syubaev on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Air temperature measurements are an important contributor to the climate record, using standardised and accepted techniques. Insights into how they might be further improved are therefore valuable, from careful evaluations and comparisons, using modern temperature sensors and data recording systems.
Perspectives
There are only a few studies on the time response of air temperature measurements under realworld field conditions, with the wind varying naturally. This work shows that the larger sensors conventionally used can be quite slow, taking many minutes to respond when the wind is light or calm.
Professor Giles Harrison
University of Reading
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Fundamental Sensor Response Time Limitations of Practical Air Temperature Measurement, Geophysical Research Letters, October 2025, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1029/2025gl118464.
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