Climate Stripes: Make Your Own
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This page will provide the instructions and Google Sheets spreadsheets to allow you to make your own climates stripes for temperature and/or precipitation, a colorful timeline, using local historical weather data if available (sources provided). This will allow you to bring climate stripes to your own backyard (state and county in US) and maybe a town in your local area, if historical weather data is available. A new easy-to-use classroom tool for use by students! What a way to introduce students to data science, via historical weather data (big data with scatter), and an easy-to-understand visualization and then story telling (it's really interpretation of data). ...and you could graph (bar or scatter plots) the data later and maybe do some mathematical modeling (Is the trend linear?). Check student understanding with the Climate Stripes Simulation and validate, a science process, student stripes with the original stripe creators web apps.
The Golden Rule in Google Sheets to get an interactive copy: go to File > Make a copy...
What are climate stripes?
Climate stripes are an elegant visualization of the annual average temperature or the temperature anomaly over time. What color do you think is the warm or hot color? If you said red for hot and blue for cold, you were correct, and the darker the red the warmer the temperature and the darker the blue the colder. The "Examining the Coloration of Climate Stripes" spreadsheet illustrates this below and has temperatures in the cell as well. It allows you to add noise or some random variation to see how color responds. Play with the noise value to see! Climate stripes are the work of Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading.
Making your own climate stripes in Google Sheets
Here are a series of GSheets spreadsheets that provide instructions to prepare climate stripes. The trick to stripes in spreadsheets is using the transpose function (converts vertical columns, typical download format, of data to horizontal rows) and conditional formatting to produce the color scale. Any time series of data, such as precipitation, can be put into a stripes visualization!!!
Just-Add-Data Climate and Precipitation Stripes
Just-add-data spreadsheet and your stripes appear (NO writing any formulas or setting up!)
Bringing Climate Stripes to Your Backyard
Instructions to set-up a spreadsheet to produce climate stripes (use of transpose function, set-up conditional formatting, and sizing cells)
Temperature Scales - Do they make a difference in your climate stripes?
Here we compare temperature scale and temperature anomalies with just-add-data spreadsheets. We introduce how to compute the temperature anomaly.
Climate Stripes for Climate Zones: A Closer Look at Warming Trends
Compares climates according to NASA from pole to pole (interpretation of patterns or story-telling). A good test of your skills!
Stripes are annual mean particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations (in micrograms per cubic meter) from 1850 to 2021. Data is a mix of experimental and computer simulations. (includes pre-made template)
Compares a scatter and bar plot to climate stripes and then adjust parameters in a pre-built interactive simulation (connects typical scatter and bar graphs with stripes to check student understanding)
Finding Sources of Data
Below is a GDoc with links to climate and other stripes plus data sources by state and county levels for the US and other countries. Finding historical weather data may be possible for your local area. This brings climate change to your backyard or local environment. Downloading .csv files from websites is the easiest way as they will open the data in GSheets.
The best source of US local historical weather data is the National Weather Service (NWS, part of NOAA). Here you will need to copy from a table of monthly data plus the annual mean and paste it into GSheets ready for use. A short instructional YouTube video is provided below. Both monthly temperature and precipitation are available.
Given below as a Goggle Doc are two tables listing sites that provide pre-made stripes of various types - temperature, precipitation, biodiversity, etc. (needed for validation) and sources of data for making your own stripes. Useful as a student handout!
What can you do with climate stripes in the classroom?
Here are the precipitation stripes for Maryland: top stripes in GSheets and bottom using NOAA site (screen capture). Author colored high rain green for vegetation! Your GSheet stripes can be validated using online sites! Validation is an important science process. Do you see a trend?
Here are the climate stripes for Fairbanks, Alaska (coldest place in US). Can you interpret the pattern? Tell a story describing the stripes!
How about comparing temperature stripes to rainfall or precipitation stripes for a location?
Fairbanks, Alaska climate stripes (1930-2022) NOAA data
Feedback and/or question form - click here for Google Form and THANKS!
Review and comment in Merlot!
Climate or warming stripes are the work of Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading, see https://showyourstripes.info/.
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