Reliable temperature measurement, particularly at high temperatures, has never been more important. It impacts on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and optimising energy use, and as industrial competition becomes ever more urgent reliable thermometry is essential, facilitating zero waste manufacture, improving product consistency and fully autonomous production.

In the last ten years there have been significant innovations in high temperature metrology which have led, or are leading to, improvements in high temperature thermometry both by contact and non-contact approaches.

In this talk some key innovations are described these are:

• An introduction to novel high temperature fixed points (to 3200 K) which have moved from laboratory research to mainstream high temperature metrology tools, especially for calibrating non-contact thermometers and thermocouples.

• The development of low drift low uncertainty thermocouples based on Pt-Pd and optimised alloying formulations of Pt-Rh.

• The development of commercial self-validating (no-drift) temperature sensors at high temperatures which allow optimised process control.

• The introduction of low uncertainty transportable flame temperature standards to validate thermometry approaches used in combustion research.

• The use of optical fibre-coupled temperature sensing for fast event traceable thermometry.

• The use of thermographic phosphors to determine reliable surface temperatures.

Finally, an outlook will be given regarding the future of temperature traceability with emphasis on the emergence of practical primary thermometry. Such an approach could provide reliable long term traceable temperature measurement at the point of measurement providing “points of truth” in embedded sensor networks of the future.