Saturday, March 16, 2013

Four weeks of climate data:
Southern Temperate Region #1

Instead of starting the Southern Temperate Region with a series of maps, let me just say how the split works in words.
Region #1. Southern Africa and Madagascar
Region #2: Southern Temperate Indian Ocean*
Region #3: Temperate Australia and New Zealand
Region #4: Southern Temperate Pacific Ocean*
Region #5: Temperate South America
Region #6: Southern Temperate Atlantic Ocean*

The asterisks on the oceanic section are because I didn't just use the polar region to look at Antarctic, but the 60th latitude instead so that no part of Antarctica would be ignored.  In my defense, the region south of the 60th latitude and north of the Antarctic Circle is famously cold, choppy and nasty with almost no land mass except the Antarctic Peninsula.
 


Southern Africa and Madagascar are pretty well covered. The grid point out in the middle of nowhere is probably Iles Crozet, a group of islands still administered by France.

Summers are getting warmer and the median and lowest temperature trends are getting increasingly warm each era.


Both the warmest and coldest records took a dip this century, but the median is getting warmer, more quickly at the turn of the century than previously. More than that, the median increase is more than a degree Celsius, a cause for alarm.



The Winter is steady but slow. Every step would be upward except that the record high is from the mid 1990s.


Almost perfect increasing trends everywhere except that the record in the 1980s was warmer that the record in the 1990s. Again, close to a degree increase in the medians.

Confidence of the region warming: 99.999%
Confidence of decreasing rate: 79.2%
Change in median temperature from the 1955-1975 interval to the 1999-2010 interval: 0.79° C

It's warming for sure, and at 0.79° C, it's warming faster that the region just to the north, which is Southern Tropical Africa. I don't consider 0.79° C a cause for alarm, but neither is it a cause for complacency.

Later this evening, the section of the Indian Ocean south of the Tropic of Capricorn and north of the 60th parallel.

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