Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Four weeks of climate data:
Northern Temperate Region #11


The next to last slice of the Northern Temperate Zone has a lot of ocean and very little land mass. As we can see on the map, the weather stations on land are at the southern tip of Greenland and the eastern tip of Canada.


You will also notice a grid square near the "#11" here on the coverage map. That dot is the Azores.


The Winter data bounces around a lot, which does not look like a convincing trend. That said, the record high this century is 1 degree C. warmer that the warn experienced in the late 1960s, the median has gone up about a half degree and the low for 1999-2010 is two degrees C. warmer than the lows in the first time period, 1955-1975.


The Spring data does show something like a steady warming trend. More than that, the amount of warming from first era to last is very noticeable. About one and a half degrees in the record high, a degree in the median and two degrees in the low.


In the Summer data, it's the median that increases every era, while both the record highs and lows have one stutter step downward. The record high only rises about a half degree, but the median is up by a degree and a half and the coldest summer of the last era was two degrees warmer than the coldest back in the 1950s.

Two degrees is a Big Damn Deal.

In the Fall data, it's the progress of the lowest temperature that is alarming in every way. It goes up every time we move forward a time interval, every increase is greater than the previous one and total change is about two degrees C.

If more of our metrics looked the bottom black line, that would be real "hair on fire" data, information that could not be denied. But a lot of data looks like the other black line or the red dotted line. Both show increases from first era to last, but they bounce around and the total increase in 56 year is a degree C and possibly less.

That said, we are 95% confident that the temperature is increasing in this region and not 95% confident that the rate is getting faster.

Later today, the last slice of the Northern Temperate Zone, Iceland, the British Isles and Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula.

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