For those of us keeping up with climate change related news, there are some numbers that have become familiar. For instance, we know that we should strive to limit global mean temperature to 1.5 °C.
On the other hand, while many of us feel like things are warmer than when we were little, finding this information specific to a location is not that trivial. Complicating this is the fact that global warming happens unevenly so everyone's experience may differ.
We're happy to be providing air quality data, available to all plans. The air quality data is SILAM dataset from Finnish Meteorological Institute, providing global coverage at 20km resolution and five day forecast of seven air pollutants (Carbon Monoxide (CO), Nitrogen Oxide (NO), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Ozone (O3), Particulate Matters < 10 microns (PM10), Particulate Matters < 2.5 microns (PM25), and Sulfur Dioxide (SO2).
An increase in air temperature leads to an increase in evaporation as warmer air is able to hold more moisture. Incredibly, this means that since 1950, there is more moisture in the atmosphere to the tune of about 2 kg or 2 litres per every square metre of earth's surface. The total volume of water that has been evaporated is equivalent to twice the volume of Lake Erie - in other words, climate change has essentially boiled off Lake Erie twice over.
Every year, the climate records are being broken and the hottest years are always within the last several years, which is a sign that we're in the midst of profound shift. Traditionally, we have defined climate as the average weather for a 30 year period, with the latest period of 1991-2020 considered as the period of new norm by NOAA.
We often hear about the temperature increases caused by climate change. However, what we perceive as heat or cold is also affected by the amount of humidity in the air because evaporation through skin plays a large part of how we regulate our internal thermal equilibrium.