UK Met Office to publish climate records

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London, England (CNN) -- The UK's weather service, the Met Office is to publish station temperature records that make up the global land surface temperature record.

Professor John Mitchell, director of climate science at the Met Office told CNN: "We are releasing the data to reassure people that climate data is sound."

The data includes information from more than 1000 stations worldwide and will be published online next week.

The Met Office said it was publishing a subset of the full HadCRUT record of global temperatures -- that's one of a handful of global temperature data sets that underpin the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The announcement comes amid a continuing controversy over leaked emails from the UK's University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) which were published on the Internet in November.

The emails were seized upon by climate skeptics who say they prove scientists are manipulating global warming data to strengthen the argument for man-made climate change.

But Professor Mitchell told CNN that he didn't see "any issue whatsoever with the soundness of global mean temperature records.

"If you look at the land data, the sea surface data temperatures and mean air temperature data, those three records independently show a 0.7 degree warming trend over the past 100 years. That's all published by the IPCC."

Professor Mitchell urged people who had become skeptical since the publication of the CRU emails to look at the evidence rather than "a selective take on emails which were stolen."

Mitchell added: "We also know that NASA have data sets that show pretty much the same trend over the past 100 years and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) also have a data set -- which, I think, is all freely available."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/12/05/climate.data.met.office/index.html