Introduction
Six years of research and a lot of independent thinking has now allowed me to produce calendars that make it easy to track daily global warming impacts for any location on the earth. In this article, I show results for the United States.
These calendars display the results of computed time series trends of daily maximum temperature changes from 1960 to 2018. These trends are computed for over 5,200 monitoring stations around the world and are available for each day of the year.
Monthly Calendars for the United States
Figure 1 contains the twelve-monthly calendars for the United States. Click here if you want to download all 12 months of these in high-resolution format. These calendars represent the total amount of change in daily maximum temperatures that have happened in the United States between 1960 and 2018. Each day of the month is shown in the upper left corner of each histogram pane. The average temperature change (deg F) across the entire USA is shown in the upper right corner of each pane.
The histograms represent daily changes measured at more than 2200 monitoring stations across the United States. Blue shaded bars represent monitoring stations that have shown cooling trends on that day across the 58 years. The red shaded bars indicate stations that have experienced warming trends.
If the histogram is shifted to the right of the vertical dashed line at 0 deg F, this means the average temperature change across the country indicates warming conditions have developed over time. Similarly, if the histograms are centered to the left of the vertical centerline, then cooling conditions have developed and the number in the upper right-hand corner will be negative (i.e., cooling). These numbers are also color-coded to indicate cooling (blue) or heating (red).
How to Use the Calendars
On any given day, you can look up the predicted average change in daily maximum temperature across the US. This change is with respect to the same day in 1960. For example (see January in Figure 1), the US is 2.58 degrees warmer on Jan 1, 2017 compared to Jan 1,1960. The value of 2.58 is shown in the upper right-hand corner of the panel which is marked as the 1st of January.
Some of the detailed Tableau Daily Digest of Global Warming Dashboards can be found and downloaded here. If you want to investigate the data for any day for yourself, you can download Tableau hyper files for any of the 365 days of data from here.
The largest detected change in January occurs on the 11th, with a staggering average change of 7.68 degrees F across the entire country. On this day, over 98% of the monitoring stations in the country indicate warming conditions have developed. This type of pattern is so compelling that it would be wonderful to understand why this is happening. I suspect it has something to do with changes in the jet stream. I can’t wait until Jan 11, 2020 to see what happens on that day. Figure 2 shows the state aggregated changes measured across the US on Jan 11.
Figure 2 – The pervasive amount of heating across the US that has happened on Jan 11 between 1960 and 2017. The percentages are the number of monitoring stations that indicate heating across each state. You can click on the graphic to see a high-resolution version.
Figure 3 shows the daily digest of global warming for Jan 11, in full detail for each of the 2,158 monitoring stations in the US. It is clear from this detailed examination of the data that Jan 11 is turning out to be an especially hot day compared to 1960.
Figure 3 – The daily digest of global warming for Jan 11, at the full level of detail showing results from 2,158 monitoring stations. You can click on the graphic to see a high-resolution version.
There have been a few examples where I have used the calendars to verify anomalous weather. To see what I mean, please read this article that examines the development of cooler summers in the US in July.
For anyone interested, Figure 4 shows all the days on one page. It is an annual calendar that contains results for all 365 days of temperature change in the United States. Many millions of data points and computations were completed to produce this figure.
Figure 4 – The entire year of daily global warming changes in the United States. You can click on the graphic to see a high-resolution version.
The Computations
To understand the motivation and critical thinking that was used to produce these calendars, please visit this site. To understand the detailed assumptions and mathematical approaches used to compute the results using over 2 million models, please read and watch the videos in the following articles.
- The Daily Digest of Worldwide Global Warming (July 2019)
- Examining 100 Million Temperature Readings to Understand Global Warming (June 2019)
Final Thoughts
I originally wrote this article about two months ago (in Nov 2019) before publishing it on Jan 9, 2020. I had forgotten about the content, so I got excited as I read the article and saw that Jan 11, 2020, is one of the targeted days I discussed. Jan 11 is now two days away.
I live in Knoxville, TN. Normally Jan and Feb are the coldest months we have. After wearing short sleeves on Christmas, I knew that the work I have been doing is shaping up to be very insightful.
Today, it is warm enough to wear short sleeves with temperatures around 63 deg F (normally 48 deg F is the daily max temp). It is Jan 9th and my calendar predicts that it is 5 degrees warmer across the country compared to 1960. Tomorrow (Jan 10) the calculations indicate it is going to be 6.6 deg F warmer than 1960 and on Jan 11th, we should see conditions that are 7.7 deg F warmer than 1960. Well, the local weather forecast is indicating highs of 67 deg F for the 10th and 76 deg F for the 11th.
It is not normal for Jan 11th to be 76 deg F in Knoxville, TN. The normal daily maximum temperature is 47 deg F. This means that we will be about 30 deg F above normal in two days. This is the face of global warming. It is real, and it is somewhat predictable. Thanks for reading.
Update: The Aftermath
It is now Jan 13th, and Jan 11th did not fail to disappoint! I am almost willing to now call Jan 11th the “Day of Global Warming in the USA”.
In Knoxville, we had a hot day with Tmax of 75 deg F (30 degrees above normal), followed by two wicked rain bands that brought sever thunderstorms, very heavy winds and tornados to our region. Figure 5 shows the characteristics of these very long, linear events.
The rain we received was intense, as shown below. What I am beginning to understand is that when we have big changes in Tmax, what this really means is that there is simply more energy in the atmosphere.
On days like Jan 11 that feature big changes in temperature, we can also expect unstable weather conditions to form. Just a few years ago, we would have had a nice snowy day in Knoxville. Instead of sledding, we felt like we should be going to the beach in Florida.
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