Warming (climate) stripes in python with ulmo

June 2021

Warming (or climate) stripe figures are a striking way to visualize climate change and its signature in temperature trends, whether global or local.

Inspired by a matplotlib blog post by Maximilian Nöthe, I wanted to connect this visualization with a data source for the United States.

The python package ulmo includes readers for NASA DayMet products.

DayMet provides daily climate variables for North America at 1 km spatial resolution going back about 40 years.

While this time series isn’t as long as used in most warming stripes figures, the spatial resolution would allow you to create unique warming stripe figures for different locations across North America.

The repository here contains a jupyter notebook that demonstrates reading DayMet data via ulmo, given a latitude and longitude of interest, and generating a warming stripes visualization for that location.

warming stripes for Seattle, WA