Sunday February 9th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog 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).😉
The French Connection…More Record Ratios Indicating Global Warming
Dear Diary. Many of you know that my greatest contribution to climate science was the introduction of surface record ratios during the 2000s as a proxy method for looking at warming trends and as a measure for what rising global averages are doing to life threatening temperature extremes. I spend a lot of time in between blog posts updating record count files then adding new ones from across the planet each year. I try to investigate what is contained in the National Center for Environmental Information system, with a goal lately of two new countries per year. The first new country for 2020 is France, which I’ll show statistics from today. Drop me a line if you would prefer me to investigate another country besides China, my next choice since it incorporates a large area of the world. Others, so far, are India, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Australia. You can find their statistics, including those for the United States, here:
https://guyonclimate.com/category/ncei-record-count-archive/
I’ll move my French Excel file data to the above archive later this week.
Now it’s time to present a smidgeon of new science. I chose France because it is a medium size country in western Europe with great areal station coverage going back to the 1930s. I did see some interruption in reports due to World War II but not as great as one might expect. I stoped at 1930 since prior to that year there were hardly any reports at all of records in the NCEI system:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
The French data like all the rest held no real big surprises, just some subtle differences going from decade to decade due to global warming. So, here are the main two decadal charts I present each year in association with daily records:
The above charts indicate what we typically see… mid 20th century cooling followed by a big increase in ratios after 1980.
Here are French decadel record counts (including ties) updated through 2/6/2020 making up the above two charts:
The only problem with the French data is that counts are only about 5% as numerous as those from the United States. Obviously this is the case since France and its overseas territories are much smaller in areal coverage as those for the U.S. Still, we can see good scientific trends.
Breaking the data down to what has happened since the turn of the 21st century here is what we see:
The only year with more daily high record maxes than minimums was 2010. Interestingly the four biggest summer heat wave years of 2003, 2015, 2017 and 2019 did not have the highest ratios.
Now let’s see if he can find another climate change signature of nights warming faster than days by comparing record high minimums with record high maxes since 1930:
Clearly and somewhat surprisingly we have a downward trend. Most other countries except for Australia have a rising trend in association with ratios of DHMN to DHMX records. I’m sure that science can explain what we are seeing, but I’m left scratching my head on this item.
Here are counts from the above chart.
Just like in the United States, France has gotten off to a mild start during the decade of the 2020s. As far as daily records go, through 2/7/2020 there have been 206 warm daily records to only 3 cold daily records from 2020. Unfortunately the disparity between hot and cold extremes will only widen this decade due to carbon pollution, except if there is a big uptick in volcanic activity. I’ll keep my readers informed from time to time on any significant change with record ratios as we move through this new decade.
Please consider donating through the Paypal widget on this site. I need everyone’s support to continue my work, especially that of processing NCEI record count data for scientific research.
Here is some more weather and climate news from Sunday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity.)
(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.)
Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”