Four weeks of climate data: Southern Temperate Region #5

The fifth region of the Southern Temperate Zone is the last major land mass to be covered, as the last region which will be discussed later today is just two small islands in the south Atlantic.

As we can see, the actual land mass of Chile, Uruguay and Argentina is very well represented, as are a few islands both east and west.

The high temperature records haven't moved much in the Summer months, but the coldest Summers are getting warmer noticeably and the median has risen slightly.

Again, the record warmest in Fall is bouncing around, but the coldest Fall since the early 1970s has jumped up about a degree while the median is almost unchanged.

Winter gives us an idea of what data should look like if there was no overall trend.

Spring on the other hand shows upward movement in the low temperature measurement and two upward steps and one downward in the median and high measurement systems.

Confidence of the region warming: 97.7%
Confidence of decreasing rate: 88.5%
Change in median temperature from the 1955-1975 interval to the 1999-2010 interval: 0.15° C



There are important people in the history of statistics who were not in love with confidence tests, W. Edwards Deming being the best known. This data goes a long way towards proving Dr. Deming's point. We are confident of a warming trend because of 24 upward steps and 12 downward, and not quite confident of a slowing rate of warming because of 9 increasing steps and 15 decreasing steps.  More to the point, 0.15° C is really small for 56 years.

Later today, two little islands in the middle of the South Atlantic get their say, our last data points covering the globe.