Alarming New Animation Shows The Months Are Indeed Getting Warmer

Gavin Schmidt’s GIFs, especially. The climatologist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has a knack for distilling large amounts of data into easily digestible animations, often illustrating historical shifts in our climate.

Earlier this month, Schmidt came up with a new one, showing monthly temperature distributions and how they’ve changed since the late 19th century: 

Schmidt's animation shows fluctuations in monthly
GISS Surface Temperature Analysis data (GISTEMP) over time,
broken into 30-year periods.

Simply put, the animation illustrates how often a month reached certain temperatures over time. Taller peaks for each month’s individual graph indicate that month hitting that temperature more often, while lower ones mean those temperatures were less frequent. (The more technical term for this is a “histogram” or “frequency plot.”)

Read the Huffington Post story by Ryan Grenoble - “Alarming New Animation Shows The Months Are Indeed Getting Warmer.”