The main purpose of this ongoing blog is 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 and are archived on each prior post. I’ll refer to extreme or temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: NCEI Global and National Record Count and Ratio Summaries at the End Of 2024
Dear Diary. At the end of every year that I have the health and privilege to live, I’ll be gleaning National Center for Environmental Information global record counts for scientific purposes. It remains unfortunate that their system does not archive this data much like it does for that of individual countries. Once a new year arrives, poof, the prior year’s global tallies are gone unless an army of statisticians were to add record reports from over one hundred countries:
This will be my fifth consecutive year for this exercise. Here is a link to what was posted last year:
As a reminder, I started this business of calculating record statistics and ratios for climate science on 1/1/2000, which led to this first study:
The main purpose for doing this year end exercise is to glean global totals to compare to global averages and anomalies with national U.S. totals. Since NCEI United States totals of record counts (including tied records) are part of global totals, I have thought to subtract these to get all totals outside of the U.S. from 2020-2024.
Here are totals from 2024 keeping in mind that El Niño transitioned to La Nina conditions by the end of the year combined with climate change spiked global temperature averages to about 1.6°C above preindustrial conditions:
Notice that global daily ratios have risen over the past four years looking at the charts listed below. I contend that extreme temperatures are very sensitive to global averages…in this case just a couple of tenths of a degree Celsius warmer this year has made a big difference in association with the intensities of heatwaves.
These statistics are no surprise since we saw a record hot 2024 that globally DHMX to DLMN ratios were near 4.75 to 1. Outside of the U.S. that NOAA figure was near 7.40 to 1.
Here are totals from 2023 keeping in mind that El Nino combined with climate change spiked global temperature averages to about 1.5°C above preindustrial conditions:
Notice that daily and monthly ratios for the globe outside of the U.S. were higher than for the United States. Interestingly, all-time ratios were higher for the U.S., indicating that summer heat was very intense here from the Southwest into the south-central states during 2023 to produce such a statistic.
Here are totals from 2022, a slightly cooler year globally at about 1.3°C above preindustrial conditions:
Nearly all ratios for 2022 were lower than those of 2023.
Here are those of 2021. Global temperature averages were about the same as those for 2022 at +1.3°C above preindustrial conditions. The U.S. had a hotter year in 2021 than in 2022:
And lastly, here are totals from 2020. Once more like in 2021 and 2022, global temperature averages were about 1.2°C to 1.3°C above preindustrial conditions:
Yes, all of these statistics are very much skewed towards what we would expect in a warming world. What will 2025 hold? Keep reading the Extreme Temperature Diary to find out.
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 2024 climatology. More reports are archived on prior January 2025 posts:
Many more notes about the Southern California fires:
Here is More Climate News from Saturday:
(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.)