Four weeks of climate data: Northern Tropics Region #1

After a few days of recap, we return to looking at new areas in our four weeks of climate data. By splitting the tropics into North and South, the amount of land area is reduced significantly in a slice, so we will split the region into six slices instead of twelve. Moreover, as we move south from the Northern Temperate Zone, there is a lot less land mass and a lot more water.  Our first slice has the most land mass of all the sections of the Northern Tropics, the bulk of Africa in these latitudes and the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula.
 

While there is a lot of land, the coverage by weather stations is not as consistent as we might hope. The Arabian Peninsula has nearly no coverage and there are gaps in Africa as we move away from the coast.

First things first. Damn, it's hot! Notice that 30° C is on all our scales from Winter to Fall. In the Northern Temperate Zone, averaging 15° C was unusually warm. (For Americans, 15° C is less than 60° F, 30° C is 86° F.)

Every reading takes two steps up and one step down. The difference in the median from 1955-1975 to 1999-2010 is about a degree. The record high was 2010.

Not a lot of data for climate change deniers to latch onto here.

In the Spring data, there is absolutely no good news for the deniers. Every step from left to right is a step up and the most recent steps are steeper. The median rise from the first interval to last is more than a degree. The record high was set in 2010.

If all the data looked like this, there would be no argument.

Once again, this is a pattern that argues strongly for a warming trend.

The strongest warming argument here is the median. The strongest argument against is the record high temperature is about twenty years old.

Confidence of the region warming: 99.99%
Confidence of increasing rate: 65.8%
Change in median temperature from the 1955-1975 interval to the 1999-2010 interval: 0.96° C

This region is warming, but we are not confident that the rate of increase is speeding up. The rise in the median 56 years is close enough to a full degree to be alarming.

Later today, the second slice of the Northern Tropics, which covers almost all of South Asia.