Friday, January 22, 2016

England's Temperature in 2015

Nine days in 2015 were the hottest for that day of the year since 1772. This compares to three in 2014, though 2014 had a hotter average temperature and was the hottest year on record in the UK.

England has a collected data on daily temperature from 1772 in the Hadley Centre Central England Temperature (HadCET) dataset.

I downloaded this Hadley Centre dataset. And I followed this tutorial. Based on an original graphic by Tufte.


Here the black line is the average temerature for each day last year. The dark line in the middle is the average average temperature (95% confidence). the staw coloured bigger lines represent the highest and lowest average daily temperature ever recorded on that day since 1772. the red dots are the days in 2015 that were hotter than any other day at that time of year since 1772.

Looking at the black line that represents last years temperatures it was the Winter and Autumn that were far above average. Instead of a scorching hot summer most of the record hot days were in November and December. 2014 had the same pattern of a hot Winter. No day in 2015 was the coldest for that date in the recorded time.

1 comment:

Paul A. Rubin said...

Nice plot! There are a couple of things I would have liked to see: a 95% prediction interval for single day temperature (for which I cheerfully trade the 95% c.i. for the mean); and a distribution for the number of record highs achieved in a year. I'm pretty sure nine would fall in the right tail of the latter distribution, but seeing is better than speculating.