Thursday, February 28, 2013

Four weeks of climate data:
Northern Temperate Region #2


The second slice of the Northern Temperate Zone has its southwestern corner in Egypt and the northeastern corner at the border of the Asian and European parts of Russia. All the major Russian cities are here, as are the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Most of Iran is in this region as is the rest of the Middle East, except for the countries below the Tropic of Cancer, Oman, Yemen and much of Saudi Arabia.


This region is not as densely populated at Europe, but even so the only gaps we see in the grid are because those grid points are not on land.


Winters are getting warmer, up about two degrees Celsius on all three of our measuring methods, warmest, median and coldest.  Only the median makes this look like a region with an increasing warming trend.


The Spring climate data also shows nearly unanimous warming trends. Only one cool Spring in the 1990s keeps this from all upward steps from left to right in all three categories.


The Summers are only about a degree or so warmer, but here the trend does look to be getting faster as we move from left to right.


The Fall data is not consistently rising from time interval to time interval. There is one downward step in all three of the measurement methods. Still, it's a warming trend in all three categories.

When all the data is taken together, we can be 99% confident this region is warming over time and 95% confident the warming rate is increasing.

Tomorrow, we look at two more slices of the Eastern Hemisphere part of the Northern Temperate Zone, regions that are dominated geographically by the Asian part of Russia, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and the north of India.

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