Exploring global temperatures since 1750

Some say climate change is the biggest threat of our age while others say it’s a myth based on dodgy science.

Exploring global temperatures since 1750 is a long-time study of climate trends contemplating our relationship with technology and nature. It is also an invitation to reflect artistic process as a way of knowing. Experiences and the consequences of one's inquiries in action can generate profound new feelings and awarenesses.

We created an experiment in data sonification and visualization that explores climate data collected between 1750 and 2013. In both video and audio we focus on the technology of measuring instruments. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study combines 1.6 billion temperature reports from 16 pre-existing archives. We sonified a long-time study of climate trends based on earth surface temperature data for the city of Berlin.

Early data was collected by technicians using mercury thermometers, where any variation in the visit time impacted measurements. In the 1940s, the construction of airports caused many weather stations to be moved. In the 1980s, there was a move to electronic thermometers that are said to have a cooling bias. Today there is a broad range of organizations that collate climate trends data. The three most cited land and ocean temperature data sets are NOAA’s MLOST, NASA’s GISTEMP and the UK’s HadCrut.

For our study we processed Earth Surface Temperature Data for several cities with digital signal processing (DSP) methods and made the results audible using modular sound synthesis.

We want to credit Berkeley Earth, which is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for providing the dataset and Kristen Sissener (Editor) from the Kaggle Team for repackaging the data to make slicing into interesting subsets (for example by country) possible.