Ocean Warming Stripes

These Ocean Warming Stripes show the alarming extent to which average global sea surface temperatures have risen in the 21st Century, compared to the norm of annual global temperatures dating back to 1850. In the visualization, each year since 1850 is represented by a colored stripe. The color of each stripe is determined by the average global sea surface temperature. As you can see, there has been a steady increase in global sea surface temperatures this century - and an alarming spike in temperatures in the last 3-4 years.

The oceans absorb over 90% of the excess heat caused by the greenhouse effect from our use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. This ocean warming has far-reaching impacts: it disrupts marine ecosystems, bleaches coral reefs, intensifies hurricanes and tropical storms, and contributes to the melting of polar ice, which in turn raises sea levels. Additionally, warmer oceans can alter global weather patterns, threaten fisheries and coastal communities, and reduce the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon, further accelerating climate change.

Climate Central has released a series of tools designed to visualize the influence of human-caused climate change on ocean temperatures around the world. In addition to the climate stripes visualization shown above, there is a Climate Shift Index interactive map that 'shows how much climate change has affected the likelihood of a particular day’s ocean surface temperature across the world.' On this map, increases in sea surface temperatures are represented using red hues.

The use of climate stripes is a particularly powerful method of visualizing temperature increases over time. In 2018, Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, released this innovative form of data visualization to illustrate how temperatures have risen around the globe over the last century. His clever Climate Stripes visualizations of global heating over time have quickly become a data visualization design classic.