One of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is Brian Brettschneider, @Climatologist49, who provides an amazing array of climate maps (and quite a few pictures of moose) from his home in Alaska (hence the 49). Today’s maps show the changes in temperature over the past 60 years by county for the US. I have not posted his maps for Alaska but he has those too on his Twitter feed. The maps show colors instead of gray where the changes are statistically significant. They were produced using data from the National Centers for Environmental Information, NOAA’s official archive of weather and climate data. Note that in the Southeast, nighttime minimum temperatures are increasing much more than daytime highs, although both are going up. Precipitation changes in the Southeast are relatively small but a lot of the region has gotten drier over time. That is certainly driven by the lack of drought in the 1960s and 1970s when temperatures were cooler and the much more frequent occurrence of droughts now in the warmer climate.
