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Homepage Info Post processed MERRA version 2 climate data, South and Central America

Motivation: wanted to observe how the climate changed during the past 40 years for different regions in the world.

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MERRA-2 post processing info

Select a location on the map to access post-processed statistics, and use the menu to select another continent. Data from MERRA-2 is used for temperature statistics from the years 1980 to 2016. The pvgis and ninja parts use the timespan 2005 till 2015 for temperature data, so we also provide data on this time-span for comparison. Both yearly and monthly overviews are included. Specifically:

This data spans countries, states, provinces or regions. Sub-regions of these enetities can differ significantly with respect to temperature or rainfall. Also the MERRA-2 climate re-analysis models can deviate from measurements. Still they give a good indication of past climate patterns.

Main observations

Since 1850 the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has risen by about 40 percent to 408 parts per million (ppm), whereas it fluctuated between 200 and 300 ppm in the past 800 thousand years and since 1980 global temperatures on earth started increasing significantly [1]. Also when we look at local data we see higher temperatures:

Acknowledgement: The Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) was developed by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office and supported by the NASA Modeling, Analysis and Prediction Program. Source data files can be acquired from the Goddard Earth Science Data Information Services Center (GES DISC). In this work we use land area weighted MERRA-2 climate data, as provided on renewables.ninja. Many thanks to NASA and the Renewables.ninja team for open access to this data.

References:

[1]
How much carbon do we emit, part 3.
[2]
Rienecker MM, Suarez MJ, Gelaro R, Todling R, et al. (2011). MERRA: NASA’s Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications. Journal of Climate, 24, 3624-3648.
[3]
Gelaro R, McCarty W, Suárez MJ, Todling R, et al. (2017). The Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). Journal of Climate, 30: 5419-5454.
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