How many days since a record-high temperature?
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
I don't know the exact parameters here, but mental math says that if we have data over 80 years, and we brashly pretend city temperatures are independent of each other, then the probability that any of the 400 cities exceeds its historical max on any given day is approximately 400/(80*365) ≈ 90 days, with arrivals following a Poisson train.
This expected gap can only grow if we correctly add in the positive correlation between nearby temperatures, but that will require working directly with the data. It would be nice if the website more obviously contrasted what we would see in toy models with no heating versus what we actually see in the real world.
If each temperature was sampled identically and independently, each place’s “time since hottest” should be flatly distributed between now and however long the recording goes back to.
Also, what the visualisation doesn't show is the longest per-state time since a record. If they're all also on the order of a year, that's a strong signal that records are increasing. If that time varies randomly between now and decades ago, it's a sign the results are more random than trending.
The daily temperature record map only shows the # of days since the last temp record was broken, so it is sort of a snapshot and doesn't depict any trend. I'd like to see each location marked for the number of temperature records broken in the past N years instead.
The all-time temperature record map is more informative, but even that would be helped by some kind of a slider or animation that lets you see the records evolve over time.
The Pacific Northwest heat wave from last year is pretty clearly visible though.
or the total number of temperature records broken per year, charted over time
Could be this error?
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How likely is it in any given year in the last 100 years that there wasn't a day or 3 breaking previous highs?
That seems like weather vs. climate to me intuitively, but I just don't know.
However, that said, 9 of 10 ten of the hottest years on record happened within the last 10 years[1] (or if NOAA is not trustworthy to you, all 10 of the hottest UK years on record are since 2002 [2]), which would be extremely unlikely to be random chance, even if temperatures were completely random.
It would take much deeper statistical analysis then I can do to tell you the sigmas of those events, though.
[1] https://www.noaa.gov/news/2021-was-worlds-6th-warmest-year-o...
[2] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...
The probability question is maybe just a math exercise at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f6-MDhygWc&t=0s
The end of that video is a riot, similar to what's going to happen with global warming.
There are other sources as well, just one of the first ones I came across.