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A range of reconstruction techniques exist to make globally-complete or near globally-complete SST analyses. The spread in global mean SST between analyses is at worst around 0.2K. The analyses are based on a variety of different statistical models suggesting that estimates of global average SST are not strongly dependent on such choices. However, current reconstruction techniques do not account for systematic errors in the data they assume errors are uncorrelated and assume that SST fields can be simply parameterized in terms of limited numbers of patterns or simple covariance relationships. Objective comparison of different reconstruction techniques and their associated uncertainty estimates would be aided by the creation of standard benchmark tests which mimic the distribution and character of observational data.
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