Temperature and ozone changes in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS) are important components and sensitive indicators of climate change. In this paper, variability and trends of temperature and ozone in the UTLS were investigated for the period 2002–2017 using the high quality, high vertical resolution GPS RO data, improved merged satellite data sets (SWOOSH and C3S) and reanalysis data sets (including the newest ERA5, MERRA2 and ERA-Interim). All three reanalyses show good agreement with the GPS RO measurements in absolute values, annual cycle as well as interannual variabilities of temperature. However, relatively large biases exist for the period 2002–2006, which reveals an evident discontinuity of temperature time series in reanalyses. Based on the multiple linear regression methods, a significant warming of 0.2–0.3 K/decade is found in most areas of the troposphere with stronger increase of 0.4–0.5 K/decade in mid-latitudes of both hemispheres. In contrast, the stratospheric temperature decreases at a rate of 0.1–0.3 K/decade except that in the lower most stratosphere (100–50 hPa) in the tropics and parts of mid-latitude in the Northern Hemisphere (NH). ERA5 shows improved quality compared with ERA-Interim and performs the best agreement with the GPS RO data for the recent trends of temperature. Similar with temperature, reanalyses ozone are also affected by the change of assimilated observations and methods. Negative trends of ozone are found in NH at 150–100 hPa while positive trends are evident in the tropical lower stratosphere. Asymmetric trends of ozone can be found for both hemispheres in the middle stratosphere, with significant ozone decrease in NH mid-latitudes and increase of ozone in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) mid-latitudes. According to model simulations, the temperature increase in the troposphere as well as ozone decrease in the NH stratosphere could be mainly connected to the increase of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and subsequent changes of atmospheric circulations.