Four weeks of climate data:Six regions for the Arctic Circle

And it starts all over again.

We start with the Arctic Circle, defined by the tilt of the earth, the region that experiences six months of darkness and six months of light each year, with the light and dark split getting more pronounced the farther north you travel.

It struck me that I could get through the data faster by splitting some latitudinal slices into six regions instead of twelve. The tropics and the polar regions take up less latitude than the temperate, so I will still be splitting the temperate zones into twelve parts, but the polar and tropical into six. The first slice is the polar part of Europe and a few Arctic islands.

Next is the second region, the central Russian polar section, again with some large Arctic islands.

The third region is polar Siberia.

The fourth region gets us to the Western Hemisphere, with parts of Russia, Alaska and Canada.

The fifth region is almost entirely Canadian with just a small slice of Greenland. Most of the land mass is made up of the Queen Elizabeth Islands.

The final region, as luck would have it, is almost all of polar Greenland.

Later today, we will be looking at the first two regions. At two regions a day, we will be finished with the Arctic this weekend and start looking at Antarctica on Monday.

Stay tuned.