19 July 2017
A Different Way of Visualizing The Global Temperature Rise
Posted by Dan Satterfield
Gavin Schmidt at NASA GISS posted the graphic below on Twitter Tuesday night and it quickly spread like wildfire. We are used to seeing the graphs with hockey stick endings of the global temperature but showing it in a sequence of normal distributions (bell curves) by month, and ending it with the data of the last two years noted, gives one a new and rather stark perspective. You can see an animation on his Twitter page here.
If you are a little shaky on what a bell curve is, watch this:
Dan, good stuff, but you omitted the best visualization from GS’s post
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/07/joy-plots-for-climate-change/
namely, the “How have seasonal temperatures changed since the 19thC?”
which is also the featured visualization in the original GS tweet.
Agreed!