All posts by Ed Hawkins

About Ed Hawkins

Climate scientist in the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) at the University of Reading. IPCC AR5 Contributing Author. Can be found on twitter too: @ed_hawkins

#ShowYourStripes

temperature, visualisation

On 21st June 2019, the #ShowYourStripes initiative was launched, providing ‘warming stripe’ graphics for virtually every country at showyourstripes.info.

The data was provided by Berkeley Earth and several national meteorological agencies, and the stripe graphics are available for 1901-2018 for most locations, but extended further backwards where the national data was easily available. The US States and UK regions have their own separate graphics, as do Stockholm, Oxford and Vienna – three of the longest continuous series in Europe.

Over 1 million graphics have been downloaded from the showyourstripes.info website, and many media outlets covered the story: BBC, Washington Post, Fast Company and Gizmodo. Continue reading #ShowYourStripes →

Climate stripes for the UK

observations, visualisation

Following the ‘warming stripes‘ graphics for different locations around the world, this post focusses on the UK. The Met Office makes easily available long-running climate data from a small number of locations*. The visualisations below show the common changes in temperature and rainfall for the five longest climate monitoring stations in that set – Stornoway, Armagh, Durham, Sheffield & Oxford – which all have data for 1883-2017. Continue reading Climate stripes for the UK →

What does ‘mean’ actually mean?

statistics, temperature, uncertainty

Are you a user of global temperature data? If so, have you ever thought about the meaning of the word “mean” in “global mean surface temperature”?

I’m guessing that for most people the answer to the second question is “no”. “Mean” is such a ubiquitous concept that we don’t think about it much. But let me try and persuade you that it might need a little more thought. Continue reading What does ‘mean’ actually mean? →

Warming stripes

LonglistClimate change is a complex global issue, requiring simple communication about its effects at the local scale. This set of visualisations highlight how we have witnessed temperatures change across the globe over the past century or more. The colour of each stripe represents the temperature of a single year, ordered from the earliest available data at each location to now. All other superfluous information is removed so that the changes in temperature are seen simply and undeniably.

Annual global temperatures from 1850-2017

The colour scale represents the change in global temperatures covering 1.35°C [data]
Continue reading Warming stripes →

John Tyndall: founder of climate science?

history

John Tyndall (c.1822–1893), Irish physicist, mountaineer, and public intellectual, is best known for his work on the absorption of heat by gases such as water vapour and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (and for explaining why the sky is blue). Seen in retrospect, he is a critical figure in the history of climate science. Yet this retrospective view hides a complex, and in many ways more interesting story.

In The Ascent of John Tyndall, the first major biography of Tyndall for more than 70 years, I unpick the motivations behind Tyndall’s work on the absorption of heat by gases, which started in 1859, and the manner in which he interpreted them.

Guest post by Roland Jackson Continue reading John Tyndall: founder of climate science? →