Climate Data: Siberia 1955-2010

The split between Siberia and the rest of Russia is usually defined as the Ural Mountains. Since I wanted to make it a rectangle is longitude and latitude, I chose 60 degree East for the leftmost cutoff point.

We think of Siberia as "frozen wasteland" and "place of exile", but I have read several Russian writer who say it has a meaning similar to the West in United States' cultural memory, a big, mostly empty place of challenge and opportunity.

Whichever it is, it certainly is not wanting for weather stations to measure its progress. Very good coverage from east to west and north to south.

The temperatures in Winter vary drastically. While the warmest Winters have spiked pretty close to each other all through the 1955-2010 era, the coldest Winters are getting generally warmer and the median keeps sneaking upward era by era.

Spring does not show as much fluctuation and the sequences show more steady increase.

Summer fluctuates even less and every measurement method shows consistent increase, but the total increase of the median from the 1955-1975 era to the 1999-2010 era is less than a degree Celsius, the mildest increase of all four seasons.

Like Winter, Fall temperatures jump around a lot. The warmest Fall are only slightly warmer, but the median has climbed over a degree and a half.

Confidence level of warming from time interval to time interval: 99.99%

Confidence level of the trend showing increasing warming: 65.8%

Average seasonal change in the medians of 1955-1975 to 1999-2010: 1.555° C.

1.555° C in 56 years is the number that matters. This is way too fast. More than that, the Siberian permafrost, like the Winter ice in the Arctic Circle, can become a really scary feedback loop. There's a lot of permafrost in Siberia, and most importantly there is a contiguous permafrost about the size of France and Germany combined. When permafrost melts, it changes the albedo, absorbing heat instead of reflecting it. If that wasn't bad enough, there is a huge amount of CO2 and methane trapped in the permafrost that will be released when it melts, things will only get worse.

I've only been looking at climate data for about ten weeks now, but I am pretty close to convinced it's real and it does not have to speed up for it to be a serious problem for humans, if not in my lifetime then in the lifetime of kids growing up today. Tomorrow, I will introduce another way to look at the data. I have not done the programming yet, so I don't know if the data will alarming or not, but it is an attempt to look at patterns worldwide instead of getting useful data region by region.