If you’re someone interested in weather news, you may have seen or heard people talking this week about showing your stripes.
Today is the sixth Show Your Stripes Day, held the first day of summer.
The annual event raises awareness for climate change and rising global temperatures by sharing “warming stripe” graphics, which display how average temperatures have changed since 1895.
About Show Your Stripes
Created by climate scientist Professor Ed Hawkins, warming stripes provide a visual representation of rising global temperatures.
Each colored line in the stripes graphic represents change in average temperature for one year.
Blue is below average and red is above average temperatures.
The darker the reds and blues, the bigger change from average temperatures.
For the countries and cities I checked, warming stripes change from a balance of red, white, and blue for the first 70-80 years to mainly red for the past few decades.
Accessibility Issues
Since warming stripes graphics use color to display temperature change over time and few people are adding alternative text to describe the graphics, people who are color blind may not be able to view the trend over time.
I hope people sharing their area’s warming stripes graphics today provide an explanation or image alternative text.
For the Michigan image shared in this blog post, here’s the alternative text I added to the image:
Multicolored graphic displays temperatures from 1895 to 2022 as lines, stacked left to right.
Alternating blue, white, and red lines dominate the majority of the graphic, except for approximately the past 30 years where shades of red and deep red lines dominate.
Visit Show Your Stripes to check warming stripes for your country, U.S. state and 179 U.S. cities.
You can learn more about Show Your Stripes from Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and communicators involved in research and sharing facts about our changing climate.
Source: Show Your Stripes
Credit: Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC by 4.0)
