In a clear sign of global warming's impact on the U.S., record-high temperatures are increasingly outnumbering record-low temperatures, a new data visualization shows.
The visualization, which is based on data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), does not incorporate the most recent data from 2014 that shows cold records are outpacing warm records in the lower 48 states. However, this is likely a temporary speed bump in a longer-term warmup, especially as the summer approaches.
The data is consistent with similar findings published in a peer-reviewed study in 2009, which found that this trend was unlikely due to natural climate variability alone.
According to Brian Abelson, a data scientist at Enigma, the open data company that published the visualization, the new analysis takes advantage of the wider availability of public data sets in order to make the topic of climate change more relatable for people. The White House has even joined the open climate data bandwagon. It launched climate.data.gov in March in an effort to localize climate data and make climate science more relatable.
"One of the great difficulties about climate change, at least in the public discourse, is how removed your common person is from the knowledge and means of understanding of what’s coming out of the scientific community,” Abelson told Mashable.
Enigma, which is headquartered in New York City, is a platform for public data that makes previously inaccessible information easily searchable. To create the visualization, including the animated map of record temperatures, Abelson and his colleagues examined data from the NCDC, including the Climate Extremes Index, which provides a measure of how unusual weather and climate conditions are. The visualization incorporates data from about 2,700 weather stations since 1964, Abelson said. (The data set was pared down from 90,000 weather stations to focus on the stations with the most reliable data.)
“In one sense you get this map showing these weather events sweeping across the country,” he says. “As you see over time this pattern emerges, there are more and more hot anomalies.”
Abelson says Enigma, which is a search and discovery platform for public data, is not trying to replicate or replace the work that climate scientists do. Rather, they are trying to fill a gap between highly technical scientific journal papers, and popular press accounts that don't include much locally relevant data.
"I certainly understand that there is a difference between us and climatologists, and we’re not trying to replace what they’re doing," Abelson says. Instead, the intent is to "more easily communicate things in the public discourse that are more digestible than perhaps the manner in which academics are communicating these findings.”
The evidence of an increase in the frequency and severity of hot temperature extremes is mounting, and it is not limited to the U.S. For example, a 2012 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that between 1951 to 1980, extremely hot summers covered just 1% of Earth’s land area. This rose to 10% of Earth's land area by 1981 to 2010.
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