Until the technology improves, I would say that satellite temperatures are less accurate than temperatures measured with in situ thermometers. Satellites do not directly measure temperature--there is a fairly complicated procedure for computing temperatures from satellite measurements. There have been numerous changes to the UAH "temperatures" since they started. Thermometer measurements, on the other hand, have been reliable for many hundreds of years.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/07/more...

" ... Ten years ago, this meant that the AGW folks were claiming RSS was right and we (UAH) were wrong, since the RSS global warming trends were greater than ours.

But now the shoe is on the other foot, and the RSS linear trend since January 1998 has actually cooled slightly (-0.03 deg. C per decade) while ours has warmed slightly (almost +0.05 deg. C per decade).

John works hard at making our dataset as good as it can be, and has correctly reminded me that he and others have several peer reviewed and published papers recent years on the subject of the accuracy of the UAH dataset: ............. "

" ... Based upon the evidence to date, it is pretty clear that (1) the UAH dataset is more accurate than RSS, and that (2) the RSS practice of using a climate model to correct for the effect of diurnal drift of the satellite orbits on the temperature measurements is what is responsible for the spurious behavior noted in the above graph.

Our concerns about the diurnal drift adjustment issue have been repeatedly passed on to RSS in recent years. ... "

RSS uses GCMs? LOL! We know those are wrong to start with.

Old news! ... or is this a new revelation for you?

I think so, the problem with thermometer readings is we do not have readings evenly all over the globe, and it is so easy to get misinformation from choosing which readings we use and which readings we dont, now if we accepted just one station which has measurements going back hundreds of years (like the UK CET) that would be okay, of course local variations would occur, but over a long enough time they should equal out,

So RSS or UAH is a better in my opinion than a hodgepodge of different stations in different places, where we might have thousands in the US a couple in Central Africa a couple in Siberia, and very few on the 70% oceans we have.

It is more difficult to manipulate, so on that account alone, yes, I think it's far more reliable. NASA has been caught red-handed tampering with the raw ground station data and not just once, but many times. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environ...

And here are pages of links showing all the details of the funny numbers being cooked up by the Alarmist climate community. http://www.climatedepot.com/?s=data+tamp...

And according to RSS Satellite data there has been no warming for more than 18 years.