Concept
Warming stripes (sometimes referred to as climate stripes, climate timelines or stripe graphics) are data visualization graphics that use a series of coloured stripes chronologically ordered to visually portray long-term temperature trends. Warming stripes reflect a "minimalist" style, conceived to use colour alone to avoid technical distractions to intuitively convey global warming trends to non-scientists. The initial concept of visualizing historical temperature data has been extended to involve animation, to visualize sea level rise and predictive climate data, and to visually juxtapose temperature trends with other data such as atmospheric concentration, global glacier retreat, precipitation, progression of ocean depths, aviation emission's percentage contribution to global warming, and biodiversity loss. In May 2016, to make visualizing climate change easier for the general public, University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins created an animated spiral graphic of global temperature change as a function of time, a representation said to have gone viral. Jason Samenow wrote in The Washington Post that the spiral graph was "the most compelling global warming visualization ever made", before it was featured in the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Separately, by 10 June 2017, Ellie Highwood, also a climate scientist at the University of Reading, had completed a crocheted "global warming blanket" that was inspired by "temperature blankets" representing temperature trends in respective localities. Hawkins provided Highwood with a more user friendly colour scale to avoid the muted colour differences present in Highwood's blanket. Independently, in November 2015, University of Georgia estuarine scientist Joan Sheldon made a "globally warm scarf" having 400 blue, red and purple rows, but could not contact Hawkins until 2022. Both Highwood and Sheldon credit as their original inspirations, "sky blankets" and "sky scarves" which are based on daily sky colours.
