Sunday, January 20, 2019

South Pole Warming

Eric Steig put this graph on Twitter:
The data are here. Here's a little smoother presentation of the data, in terms of anomalies relative to 1957-1986:


It's just one location -- Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station -- so it can't speak for the whole continent, and it's almost two miles in elevation, but it's still interesting.

4 comments:

Layzej said...

My bet is that it regresses back to the mean over the next 10 years.

David Appell said...

Any particular reason(s) why?

Layzej said...

Just a hunch. Eric Steig may have good reason to believe that something happened in the year 2000 to reverse the apparent downward trend, but I don't see it just looking at the graph. To me it just looks like fluctuations around a flat trend.

David Appell said...

Good point. The current spike is the only one in 60 years that was above a previous spike. I'll keep track and see how it looks in a year or so.