Visualization of the Week: Northern Hemisphere summers are getting hotter

NASA animations show increasingly hot summer temperatures, especially since 2000.

If you count yourself on the critic side of the global warming debate, NASA has a couple new visualizations that might provide more food for thought. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio put together the animations below that show increasingly hot temperature anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere.

In this first animation, the bell graph charts the seasonal mean temperatures between 1951 and 2011, showing a shift toward hot summers. A post by Wyle Information Systems’ Patrick Lynch at the Scientific Visualization Studio blog explains the curve to the right shows decreasing “hot” anomalies deviating from the standard norm, varying from “hot” to “very hot” to “extremely hot.” To the left, the curve shows “cold” deviations from the norm, varying from “cold” to “very cold” to “extremely cold.” The standard “normal” temperatures are represented by the .43 and -.43 standard deviation mark range; the seasonal mean temperature base period is set between 1951-1980 and is plotted at the top of the curve.


Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio

Lynch explains the significance of the curve’s movement through the 60-year period:

“As the graph moves forward in time, the bell curve shifts to the right, representing an increase in the frequency of the various hot anomalies. It also gets wider and shorter, representing a wider range of temperature extremes. As the graph moves beyond 1980, the temperatures are still compared to the seasonal mean of the 1951-1980 base period, so that as it reaches the 21st century, there is a far greater frequency of temperatures that once fell 3 standard deviations beyond the mean.

This second animation shows increasingly hot summertime temperatures (June-July-August) in the Northern Hemisphere between 1955 and 2011, with the mean base temperature comparison set between 1951 and 1980 (the colors are charted in this associated standard deviation bar):

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio

Lynch explains the significance of the increasing temperatures shown in the animation in a separate post at the Scientific Visualization Studio blog:

“The visualization shows the increasing occurrence, in particular, of “extremely hot” temperatures since 2000. While these temperatures were experienced by less than 1 percent of land areas during the base period, about 10 percent of land areas have experienced these summer temperatures since 2000. These extreme heat events include the heat waves in Europe in 2003, Russia in 2010, and Texas and Oklahoma in 2011.”

Hat tip: Anthony Wing Kosner highlighted these two visualizations in a post at Forbes, along with a nice analysis; he also made the files available and sharable via YouTube.

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