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Monday 31 December 2018

The cities of endless summer -- how is our weather changing (2018 version)?

TL;DR -- it's getting hotter. No matter which city I look at, if someone has been taking temperature measurements for a few decades, I keep seeing the same trend. One degree of warming every 40-60 years, and a trend towards fewer cool days, and more hot days.





In 2017 I wrote a blog post -- http://blog.ifost.org.au/2017/01/farewell-to-cold-winters-and-hello.html -- inspired by the heat wave that Sydney was experiencing at the time. Funnily enough, it's the last day of 2018 and we're having another heatwave. I've updated some of the charts, and created a new Jupyter notebook.

All the examples I'm showing here are in github. If you are learning data science, it shows
some useful techniques (pandas, zipfiles, linear models).
https://github.com/solresol/endless-summer/blob/master/cities-of-summer.ipynb

Sydney


It "feels like" winter in Sydney when the maximum temperature is below 20. It means you have the heater on (or for me it means I need to light a fire). It feels like summer when the minimum temperature is above 20; you have to sleep with at least a fan and you can dive into the pool or sea any time of the data or night and it isn't uncomfortable.

I was born in 1972, and my mother said that being pregnant with me that summer was awful, and the summer at the beginning of 1973 was worse. She spent a lot of time in the pool that summer. So let's look at 1972 and 1973, 50 years ago and 100 years ago, and the most recent few years.


Yearminimum_above_20maximum_below_20
18591146
19187127
196841120
197221119
197348109
20167079
20178187
20186198


So yes, she wasn't wrong -- 1973 was pretty incredible. It's just that 2018 (which was pretty mild) was even worse.

Let's just put that in perspective. 100 years ago, sweltering days where the temperature never got below 20 were really rare. Here's the complete list of them from 1918.

MinMaxYear
Date
1918-01-1520.625.81918
1918-01-2220.626.71918
1918-01-2520.126.21918
1918-02-0421.627.21918
1918-02-1021.124.91918
1918-02-1220.827.31918
1918-03-0520.526.91918


We've had more than that in the last two weeks of December 2018. We might even have 7 days continuously if this heatwave stays.

Cold days vs Hot Days

So is Sydney becoming the city of endless Summer?

Here's a chart, counting the number of hot days and cold days in Sydney since records began:




We can plot the difference between those two charts. For each year, how many cold days were there, and how many hot nights were there?




  • Who wants to take a bet on the first year when there are more summer-like days than winter-like days?
  • (Equivalent) When do you think the chart below is going to hit 0?

I'm guessing around 2020, even though the trendline suggests it won't happen until 2030 or later.

We'll declare Sydney the city of summer, because we won't have much of a winter.