The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary 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).😉
Main Topic: My Australian Research into Average Temperature Anomalies and Extreme Sensitivities
Dear Diary. As many of my followers know, my main claim to any climate fame is coming up with a method to measure planetary warming using counts of surface record ratios. Of course, if our climate warms, it stands to reason that over time one would see less reports of record chill and more record heat, which would be reflected in statistics of ratios. You can peruse my initial research here:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2009GL040736
For the last twenty-five years I have been logging counts of records in Microsoft Excel files to verify that study while adding information pertaining to temperature rankings for the United States, like so:
DHMX= Daily High Max Reports. DLMN= Daily Low Min Reports. DHMN= Daily High Min Reports. DLMX=Daily Low Max Reports.
Boldly highlighted red, blue, or purple colored months, such as December 2023 and June 2021, that have ratios of >10 to 1 or <1 to 10 of daily warm to cold records are either historically hot or cold, most of which have made news. NCEI rankings are for the lower 48 states with the warmest ranking since 1895 of average temperatures being 130 and 1 being the coldest as of 2024. Blue colors represent cold months and red warm. Those months and years with counts close to a 1 to 1 ratio of highs to lows are colored black. All-time record hottest or coldest months and years are boldly colored in purple. NCDC rankings have been color coded (under tabs in each file) such that values of 54 to 74 are black representing neutral months or years (+ or – 10 from the average ranking of 64).
To improve these charts for science, this year I started to add anomaly values. It dawned on me that this can be done for other country’s data sets such as Germany and Australia. Here are a couple I recently came up with from Australia:
I’ve matched up Australian anomalies with NCEI record reports with good results. The reason for doing this is to get a good correlation between avg. temp. anomalies and record numbers for various areas on the planet. This is a matter of climate sensitivity.
The goal here is to use monthly forecast anomaly values to get a rough value of hot or cold record ratios for weather alerts for a country, based on prior climatology. Meteorological models are getting accurate on broad patterns out past 15 days and could be accurate a whole month out in time soon…something thought to be beyond science’s ability to do so only a few years ago, so such a tool for items like heat wave forecasting might be useful.
In the future we might be able to forecast numbers of extremes in association with a heat wave and perhaps most extreme all-time record potential if we can forecast anomalies over a given area such as Australia for a coming month. The CONUS of the United States, Canada, and Australia look like good candidates for this treatment given great data sets coming from these countries. Going into 2025 my main Guinea pigs will be Australia and in time the U.S.
Over the last month I’ve come up with this chart, which gleans data from the two Australian charts shown above:
It’s intriguing how high ratios become once anomalies exceed only +2.0°C above 1961-1990 conditions from 2000 to 2019. If a met model were to forecast roughly an anomaly of +2.0°C for an upcoming summer month, for example, authorities could better get a handle on an expected number of records for a heat wave event and act to put out alerts weeks in advance of a heat wave.
As a side note, one can see an overwhelming number of warm events VS. cold events since the start of the 21st century due to climate change on the above charts
This science is new and very preliminary, so comments and constructive criticisms are welcome.
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is some brand-new November 2024 climatology. Other items are archived on prior December posts:
Here is More Climate News from Friday:
(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. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)