Introduction
In a recent article, I introduced the simple idea of a global warming calendar. It might be a simple idea, but that idea took me about six years to develop! Since it is Earth day today, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit the topic.
These monthly calendars help me to understand the temperature changes that are occurring over time as detected by using the past 60 years of data. The use of this data involves more than 200M temperature readings and 2M models. I produced the calendars for the US as a whole and for certain individual states and other countries.
Over the past few days, I saw an interesting pattern in the histograms that prompted me to write this short article. I don’t know why this change has developed, but it is an interesting phenomenon.
The Weird Pattern in April
Each month, I update my computer monitor background image to use the current global warming calendar for the US. This allows me to check my local and regional weather to see if it is consistent with the theories I’ve been developing over time. This is the month of April, and today is April 22 (Earth day).
A few days ago, I noticed a weird histogram pattern and wondered what this pattern represented. Figure 1 is the April calendar and the weird pattern begins on April 19th and lasts through today, April 22. Can you see it?
The histogram splits into a bi-modal distribution, with a second mode of more intense heating splitting off of the histogram. This implies that more intense heating is occurring at more monitoring stations than expected. I wondered what this represented in terms of the spatial temperature changes, so I decided to take a look.
To visualize the patterns, I went back to my daily digest of global warming for these four days in April and I produced the following series of figures for April 19th (Figure 2) through April 22nd (Figure 5).
Zooming into April 20th
If I zoom into April 20th to understand the red and blue circles, I can see that there is a big difference in what is happening in the west vs the mid-west on this day. As shown in Figure 6, the red highlighted Western US monitoring stations show an average change of over 7.5 deg F, which is a really big change over a really big region. As you can see from the bar chart in the lower right, there are several stations with >15 deg F total temp change.
Conversely, in the mid-west, the blue highlighted circles represent significant cooling in the mid-west. Again, this is a very consistent pattern over a very large region. I don’t know what has caused these changes. Only time will reveal the true cause of this, but I suspect jet stream perturbations are possibly one of the causes.
One of the things that has become clear to me in studying these patterns is that March is the month that best represents the most significant changes being produced by man-made global warming. There is a lot more heat in the atmosphere during this month than any other month when compared to the 1960’s.
A second finding is that the higher energy in March may be fueling April as the month that features the largest and most significant storms in the south-east. Tornadoes, hail, and damaging winds happen throughout the month. Huge amounts of moisture leave the Gulf of Mexico and rip upwards to the northeast. The video shown below is from late March. We also have had two rounds of tornadoes pass through our region in April. I now wonder if another tornado alley is developing in the southern states of AL, GA, TN, etc.
Patterns
I encourage everyone to look for patterns in your daily life. I may not always know what the climate change patterns mean, but it is interesting to identify them. Here are some patterns from our backyard over the past few days!
Final Thoughts
Two days ago on 4/20/20, at 8:20:20, the military date and time was 20:20:20 2020. This should be a signal for us, a coded message per se, to tell us to use our 20:20 vision and learn how to take care of the earth and each other. We need to make changes. We are running out of time. We need to be friendlier to Mother Nature.
