The purpose of this article is to assess geographical differences that exist in the differential trends between the satellite-based lower-tropospheric temperature measurements and the near-surface temperatures measured by the land and sea thermometer network. Over the period 1979--1994, a highly significant difference of 0.28 ¿C exists between the two global data sets. Analyses, presented in this paper show, that most of this difference comes from tropical ocean areas, with a much smaller contribution from the mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere. The implications of these results to the many explanations for the differential trend between the data sets are discussed. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996