Sunday March 18th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing post will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials)😊. Here is today’s main climate change related topic: (If you like these posts and my work please contribute via the PayPal widget, which has recently been added to this site. Thanks in advance for any support.)
How Rare Are All Time Records?…Part 2
After yesterday’s little experiment let’s press on giving the same treatment to high minimum and low maximum record temperature reports from the NCEI database. First, let’s present record counts of these two data sets from the Record Count Archive:
Now let’s present a new chart from the above data similar to yesterday’s:
I see the same results as those of RHMX and RLMN with the RHMN and RLMX datasets. During the colder decades from 1950-1979 the ratios are higher between the more extreme monthly and all-time records because it was harder for weather to produce exceptionally warm temperatures. Note that the ratios decrease after the 1970s from over 400 to slightly over 200 for ratios of RDHMN to RAHMN indicating that it was easier for weather to produce all-time hot records.
Likewise for the cold record set…low maximums…there was a spike in the 2000s of a ratio near 2,700 for DRLMX to ARLMX since the climate has warmed after the turn of this century. This decade we have seen about 800 RDLMX for every 1 RDLMX recorded in the NCEI database; 710 RDLMN to 1 RALMN on average; about 258 RDHMX to 1 RAHMX recorded; and 217 RDHMN to RAHMN. So ultimately for the 2010s, so far, we have seen 1510 to 1 daily cold records to all-time record cold reports vs. only 475 daily record warm record reports to every 1 all-time record hot report, indicating that all-time record warmth is happening more often than all-time record cold…a good marker for climate change.
The Climate Guy