December 2012 Summary

December 2012 GGIC Summary

Inspired by December 2011's GGIC summary, I thought I would take a look at another school in the region to see if they have experienced a similar trend for December temperatures.

This school, Primarschule Neufeld in Thun, Bern Switzerland, has been collecting atmosphere data since 1998.  This provides a great record to examine short term change.  Remember that the best idea for calculating a climate normal is to use 30 years of data.

The graph below shows the monthly average temperature for each December since 1998, which indicates a temperature trend of 0.088°C over the entire time period.

A timeseries showing December monthly temperatures from 1998-2012

A timeseries showing December monthly temperatures from 1998-2012;
All data is GLOBE student collected data

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 1.101°C.  From here you can examine how each December departs from that average, and put it into graphical format, like below.

Departure from the 10 year (1998-2007) average December temperature

Departure from the 10 year (1998-2007) average December temperature;
All data is GLOBE student collected data

A big thank you to the 217 schools that participated in this IOP!  You represented 29 countries and entered over 241,700 data points.  Join us in March 2013 for the next IOP.