The Race for Warmest Recorded Year
2016 was warm, and for the past few months I've been looking at just how warm it was compared to other years going back to the 1880s. Over the summer 2016 had pulled out to a commanding lead, but then the race tightened up again during the chilly fall.
And in the end, 2016 finished in...(drumroll)
So 2016 finishes in 3rd place, just below 1981 and 1987 and with a reasonable gap over 2015.
If you're curious what this chart all means it's easiest to go back to read How warm is 2016? (September Edition). Generally though, it tracked how much warmer each day of the year was compared to the 20th century average - warm days get points and cold days lose them.
January of 2016 was just a little bit warmer than average, but then things took off in February. By early April 2016 was in 1st place, and its lead just continued to increase through the summer.
So lets take a closer look at where 2016 faltered:
Here we're zoomed in on October through December.
At the end of September, 2016 was still well in the lead. But then a very cool start to October pushed it down into a tie with 1981. But then a very warm start to November pushed it solidly into 1st place again! But then a December coldsnap dropped it down below 1981, and eventually below 1987. The final few weeks of December were quite warm, but not warm enough to recover.
The "points" that are listed here aren't particularly meaningful - they're the total number of degrees above the 20th century average for each year. 2016 ends up at 1068, which averages out to each day of the year being 2.9°C warmer than the 20th century average. That's just an abstraction, because daily temperatures are obviously more variable than that. But it allows us to compare these different years, and 2.9°C for 2016 is just a bit below the 3.0°C for 1st and 2nd place 1981 and 1987. And down in 4th place, 2015 averaged 2.5°C above the 20th century average.
NOAA
There are other ways that one could calculate warm/cold years, but I used this method because it's similar to what is used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which I talked about way back in Edmonton's warmest years (or NOAA anomalies, NOAA problems).
Here's the updated list of all of Edmonton's warmest/coldest years:
On this chart I've added a line for the 2-year average, which might sound like a strange thing to talk about, but I've included it here as a way of measuring pairs of years.
2016 was very warm, and so was 2015. Even though individually they rank 3rd and 4th, the two of them taken together are the warmest 2-year period on record. The previous warmest 2-year period was 1987-1988 (each ranked 2nd and 5th respectively), but 2015-2016 just edges them out.
I'll take another look at this later in January once NOAA's updates are out.
Temperature Distribution and Records
Here we have the high temperatures throughout 2016.
In terms of warmest-highs, we broke 25 recent records going back to 1996, and that included 7 records going all the way back to 1880. Most of those were in February through May, and then again during the November heatwave.
For coldest-highs we didn't break any all-time records, but we set 5 recent coldest-highs, most of them during the very cold start to October.
For warmest-lows 2016 set 34 recent records, including 7 all-time records. And similar to the highs, those were during February-May, and then again in November.
For coldest-lows we just can't compete with the 1880s, but compared to recent years we set 5 records scattered throughout the back half of the year.
Finally for today, here are the high & low temperatures again, but this time the days that were warmer than the recent average are highlighted with red, and days below are in blue:
Looking back at the year as a whole, February through May were almost completely above the average, and not just by a little but by a lot. Then in June and July things settled down a bit, but were still pretty warm. August and September were a mix of above and below average. And then in October, November and December the temperatures swung back-and-forth between the very top and bottom of the range.
According to actual climate experts the Earth saw a super-El-Niño during 2015-2016, and the effects of it ended during the summer. And that matches up with what we saw in Edmonton, with the first half of 2016 being consistently very warm, and the second half being a bit more all-over-the-place.
In Part 2 of the 2016 Year-in-Review we look at precipitation and snow.
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