Warming Stripes

A simple colour coded way of presenting climate change. Suitable for continuous data, e.g. annual temperatures.

Extendable to all sorts of other measurements

  • Sea level rise

  • Sun hours

  • Rainfall

Warming stripes derived from Central England annual temperature degrees Centigrade from 1659 to 2020

A video on how to make your climate stripes in Excel the same technique applies to Google Sheets

Excel sheet with data and instructions

Google sheet with data and instructions (note, written for Excel, there may be slight differences)

CET average temperature for each decade since 1659

blue below average, red above

High water tidal levels Liverpool 1768 to 1996

green below average, dark blue above

Annual hours of Sunshine Oxford Observatory 1881 to 2020

dark grey below average, bright yellow above

There is a significant correlation between sunshine duration (SD) and diurnal temperature variation (the difference between the maximum and minimum temperatures within 1 day, an important meteorological indicator associated with climate change). The strong relationship between temperature and SD applies to Europe since the second half of the twentieth century.

Warming stripes for use here