#ShowYourStripes: one excellent climate change visualization

Just a quick post, friends. In the midst of a lot of other things going on I wanted to join today’s climate change awareness event.

To explain: some of you may know about the climate or warming stripes visualization.  Created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins (University of Reading), this information representation arranges vertical stripes in a horizontal sequence.  The X axis is time; each stripe’s color indicates relative temperature compared with the previous one.  As Wikipedia puts it, the thing is “a series of coloured stripes chronologically ordered to visually portray long-term temperature trends”

For example, here’s one for the world:

At a glance you can see the temperatures rise from left to right.  And it looks pretty elegant, too.  Folks have turned these into art, from posters to clothing.  For example,

Climate stripes have been around for some time, but today is #ShowYourStripes day.  So I used this handy website to produce one for the city I’m adjacent to, Washington DC:

I prefer to add the dates, even at the cost of losing some streamlining.

That helpful site also generates more traditional bar graphs, like so:

Try generating your own. And share!