December 2011 - Great Global Investigation of Climate
December 2011 GGIC Summary
The month of December is both the start of meteorological and astronomical winter in the Northern Hemisphere. It's a great time to be involved in the Great Global Investigation of Climate as you can get a sense for how your school changes in the solstice season.
With GLOBE being nearly 17 years old, there can be close to 17 years of data to examine. This is the case for Zakladni Skola - Ekolog. Praktikum in Jicin, Czech Republic, as they've been collecting data since 1995. While the typical climate study requires at least 30 years of data, it is possible to examine short term changes in a local environment and compare that to a longer period.
The following image is a look at each December's monthly average temperature, beginning in 1995. The black line represents the temperature trend over the seventeen years that this school has collected data – an estimated increase of .1601°C over the 17 year period.
Using this knowledge, and setting the base 10 year reference period of 1998-2007, it is easy to calculate the short-term average for this station to determine the departure from that average. The average temperature for December is 0.211°C. From here you can examine how each December departs from that average, and put it into graphical format, like below.
Notice that at the beginning of the time period the occurrence of below normal temperatures was more common. As time progressed, temperatures became more above normal, which supports the trend in monthly temperature. Globally, the month of December 2011 was the 322th consecutive month where global average temperature was above the 20th century normal – the last month that was below normal across the globe was February 1985.
Thank you to the 447 schools that participated from 35 countries in this IOP. You entered approximately 346,600 data points into the GLOBE database! The next IOP will run from 1-31 March, 2012.