Stripe by Stripe
The warming of 500 cities since 1950, laid down one stripe at a time.
Every stripe is one year of one city, blue cooler and red warmer than its 1971–2000 average. Every city is a short stop motion movie in story size, ready to share.
No city by that name.
How it is made
- The data. For every city the daily mean temperature since 1950 comes from the ERA5 reanalysis of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, through the Open-Meteo historical weather API. The days of each year are averaged into one number.
- The stripes. Each year is compared with the city's own 1971–2000 average and coloured on Ed Hawkins' scale: the darkest blue and the darkest red are 2.6 standard deviations below and above it.
- The movie. The stripes are laid down like strips of paper, one year a picture, six pictures a second, on a page that shakes a little as a hand-made film does. At the end the poster stays, with how much warmer the last ten years were than the first ten.
- Share it. Each movie is 1080 × 1920, the size of a story. Download the video or the poster from its page.