The hottest months on record

Color the hottest of each month on record for the past 137 years

Data sources

Global Surface Temperature Anomalies: Monthly Global Land and Ocean. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Centers for Environmental Information. Accessed February 2017. This data contains:

• Monthly global land and ocean (combined) temperature anomalies with respect to the 20th century average (1901-2000)
• Covers 1880 to 2016

How the data was used

• Temperature anomalies were then grouped by month of the year (i.e. January, February, etc.)
• Each month-group were sorted from highest (hottest) to lowest (coolest)
• The top 9 hottest months for each month-group were identified and labelled (i.e. the 9 hottest January’s, the 9 hottest February’s, etc.)
• Since all of the 9 hottest months for each month-group occurred after 1990, the visualization only shows 1990 to 2016

Code

A python script is available in the code repository to generate or extend this activity, and can be run like this:

python temperature.py

Which will simply create an svg file with the hottest months for each month-group labelled. You can also add some optional parameters like this:

python temperature.py -rank 10 -ys 1980

In this example, it would show the top 10 hottest months for each month-group (instead of just 9), and would start at 1980 (instead of 1990)