climate stripes

climate stripes, any graphical representation of historical temperature data that appears as a series of colored vertical stripes. Ordered chronologically, the series can be used to represent changes in an area’s average temperature over time. Each stripe in a graphic depicts the average temperature value for a given year compared with the long-term average temperature for the entire period. Colder-than-average years are shaded blue, and warmer-than-average years are shaded red, with darker shades indicating more extreme temperatures. Climate stripes are primarily used as a simple but effective depiction of the phenomenon of global warming over the whole of the instrumental temperature record (that is, the record taken from traditional thermometer readings).

Climate stripe depictions can be produced at local, regional, and global scales, as long as a location can be linked to a long-term temperature data set. As such, the striped pattern for a given location or scale is unique; however, all patterns will show a trend toward higher temperatures in more recent years compared with those further back in time.

Origin

British climate scientist Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science is credited with creating the climate stripes visualization tool; however, his idea was inspired by the global warming blanket created by his colleague, British climate scientist Ellie Highwood, who would knit squares of crochet each day using colors that depicted the local daily temperature. Previously, Hawkins illustrated long-term change in Earth’s temperature with an animated spiral graphic that tracked temperatures from 1850 to 2016. He received the Royal Meteorological Society’s 2017 Climate Science Communication Prize for the spiral graphic, and the depiction was so striking that it was featured in the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games.

Hawkins started to develop the idea of warming stripes in early 2018. He tested the concept by presenting the climate stripes as a banner at a lecture he gave during the 2018 Hay Festival in Wales, where it received positive feedback. On May 22, 2018, he published several sets of climate stripes online that illustrated temperature increases over time in regions around the world. Once again, Hawkins’s work gained notice, and he was awarded the 2018 Royal Society’s Kavli Medal and Lecture.

Popularity as a climate awareness tool

Hawkins collaborated with Robert Rohde (an American scientist with Berkeley Earth, which is an American nonprofit organization focused on environmental data science and analysis) to launch a website on June 17, 2019, called showyourstripes.info, where visitors can generate climate stripes relevant to their own regions and download images of them for personal use. The site was the centerpiece of a climate awareness campaign, #ShowYourStripes, which urged people to post their region’s climate stripes on their social media accounts. The campaign was supported by UN Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. More than one million stripe graphics were downloaded from more than 180 countries by June 24, and the campaign is repeated annually on June 21, a date recognized as #ShowYourStripes Day.

As a symbolic representation of climate change, climate stripes have become ubiquitous. They appear on meteorologists’ broadcasts, magazine and book covers, pins, articles of clothing, and public transportation; climate stripe images have even been projected onto major landmarks. The visualization tool has also been adapted to illustrate other phenomena affected by global warming, such as changes in precipitation, biodiversity loss, and declining ocean pH (see also ocean acidification). Hawkins receives no money for the widespread use of his design, preferring it to be a free resource for climate change education.