Climate change exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, a critical threshold international leaders agreed we must avoid as a global average, already impacts about 10 percent of the planet. The Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting this year for its series of articles investigating these hot spots.
The Post is now making its analysis of U.S. climate data accessible to the public to promote a deeper understanding of the regional and local effects of climate change. The data will allow you to create your own charts showing the changing temperatures in your county or state, map temperature change in your region and explore seasonal differences in climate change.
How to download this data
We are offering several data files that are the product of our analysis of climate change in the contiguous United States from 1895-2019 and can be downloaded from the following links:
More details about the methodology for each of these files can be found in our GitHub repository, which also contains the code used to produce the files.
About our analysis
To analyze warming temperatures in the United States, The Washington Post used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Divisional Database (nClimDiv) and Gridded 5km GHCN-Daily Temperature and Precipitation Dataset (nClimGrid) data sets, which provide monthly temperature data between 1895 and 2019 for the Lower 48 states. We calculated annual mean temperature trends in each state and county in the Lower 48 using linear regression — analyzing both annual average temperatures and temperatures for the three-month winter season (December, January and February).
