Created January 2023/Updated October 2023
The purpose of this post is merely to catalogue counts of daily record reports (high maximums, high minimums, low minimums, low maximums) coming into the National Center for Environmental Information’s site and to depict all related charts and graphs produced in my Excel files for the country of South Africa. I am in the process of constantly updating this data verifying the 2009 Meehl et. all surface Records published in Geophysical Science that I initiated from 2000-2009. Each individual count could be a tied surface record or one broken by several degrees Fahrenheit. Here is the link to the NCEI site:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
More from NCEI:
“The daily records summarized here are compiled from a subset of stations in the Global Historical Climatological Network. A station is defined as the complete daily weather records at a particular location, having a unique identifier in the GHCN-Daily dataset.
For a station to be considered for any parameter, it must have a minimum of 30 years of data with more than 182 days complete each year. This is effectively a “30-year record of service” requirement but allows for inclusion of some stations which routinely shut down during certain seasons. Small station moves, such as a move from one property to an adjacent property, may occur within a station history. However, larger moves, such as a station moving from downtown to the city airport, generally result in the commissioning of a new station identifier. This tool treats each of these histories as a different station. In this way, it does not “thread” the separate histories into one record for a city.
This tool provides simplistic counts of records to provide insight into recent climate behavior but is not a definitive way to identify trends in the number of records set over time. This is particularly true outside the United States, where the number of records may be strongly influenced by station density from country to country and from year to year. These data are raw and have not been assessed for the effects of changing station instrumentation and time of observation.”
All counts include ties of records.
An updated 2016 study from Dr. Gerald Meehl indicates that the ratio from year to year will average around 15 to 1 by 2100 for the United States:
Per one of the authors of both the 2009 and 2016 studies, Claudia Tebaldi said “This climate is on a trajectory that goes somewhere we’ve never been. And records are a very easy measure of that.”
All of the data listed below is part of this one chart. The ratio of daily record highs to lows for the 2010s is higher than any other decade since the 1910s (For South Africa):
Here is the decadal bar graph of daily record high maximums vs. daily record low minimums:
Here are the current daily record counts per decade, which have gone into the prior chart:
The 2020s:
In this genome blue colors represent cold months and red warm. Those months with counts close to a 1 to 1 ratio of highs to lows are colored black. I am searching for a database that contains rankings for South Africa, so spaces for rankings are blank for now. I have opted not to catalogue data prior to 1970 since record counts decrease substantially prior to that year. Time stamps for when I last updated counts are located in the upper left-hand corner of each chart. Drop me a note if you see an error or if you have suggestions for improvements.
The 2010s:
The 2000s:
The 1990s:
The 1980s:
The 1970s:
All of the data listed below is part of this one chart. So far, the ratio of daily record high minimums to low maximums for the 1990s is higher than any decade since the 1970s:
Here are the current daily record counts per decade, which have gone into the prior chart:
The following is a dataset that implies that days are warming faster than nights across South Africa:
The 2020s:
For the following data sets of record high minimums and low maximums from South Africa, blue colors represent cold months and red warm. Those months with counts close to a 1 to 1 ratio of highs to lows are colored black. I have opted not to catalogue data prior to 1920 since record counts decrease substantially prior to 1920. Time stamps for when I last updated counts are located in the upper left-hand corner of each chart. Drop me a note if you see an error or if you have suggestions for improvements.
The 2010s:
The 2000s:
The 1990s:
The 1980s:
The 1970s:
This is all of the National Center for Environmental Information of daily record count per month data for South Africa going back to 1970.
The Climate Guy