Four weeks of climate data: Northern Tropics Region #5

The fifth slice of the Northern Tropics covers all of Central America, much of Mexico and the Caribbean the the northwest corner of South America. This is one time when it might have made sense to make the slices different widths to get the rest of tropical South America north of the Equator in our range, but I didn't do that. I will be looking at slices that are not quite as arbitrary in the future.

The grid points show the Pacific coast and very little to the west of it, but the Caribbean is full of inhabited islands and so we get a lot of grid points there.

Like many tropical regions, the overall change in this time period is very mild compared to the wild fluctuations seen in the polar regions. Still, the general trend is warming, as shown by the median graphed in red dots as usual.

Spring is similar to Winter.

Summer shows the upward trend in every metric. If climate change is considered bad news, the only good news here is that the median rose less than a half degree in 56 years.

Once again, the record highs and lows jump around a little while the median marches steadily upward.

Confidence of the region warming: 99.8%
Confidence of increasing rate: 65.8%
Change in median temperature from the 1955-1975 interval to the 1999-2010 interval: 0.43° C

We can definitely show a warming trend overall, but it is less than a half degree and the rate is getting can't be said to be increasing.


Later today, the last of the Northern Tropics, a corner of South America, a corner of Africa and a lot of the Atlantic.