The Center of Europe
These countries make up the center of Europe. While a couple have some coastline, they are mostly inland, but not dominated by the cold Asian air nor moderated by the Gulf Stream or Mediterranean. Yet Asian winds can bring cold from time to time. The range of monthly anomalies can be quite large.
These countries often have very long temperature histories. As a result, some of these graphs are quite large. Please click on them to get a larger and more readable graph.
We saw Germany in an earlier posting as the annual average dT/yr while this version has the full monthly data. While there is some wobble to the data, Germany has little net trend. The start has both lower lows and higher highs. Once enough thermometers are in place, the trend is just dead flat.
Not to be outdone by Germany, we have Hungary with an incredibly flat history.
And Austria with about 1/3 C rise in the trend line over 230 years. Hardly the stuff of worries.
Finally something more interesting than dead flat, the Czech Republic has two flat segments with a “splice” at the “bullseye” where the monthly anomalies all run through zero at about 1950. I find it fascinating that the trend lines end up so close to parallel. Wonder fi there was a change of calibration at the start of the Cold War…
Slovakia too gets a “splice” at a “bullseye” point, but this one is in about 1942. The segment post splice is higher, but with a gently dropping trend line. Go figure… The record is shorter too. It starts at “only” 1852.
And as a complete surprise we have Switzerland with a fairly consistent rise over time. While it’s not at all what I would have expected (the Swiss are usually much better at things requiring care and calibration) it would appear that much of the “warming” available for “homogenizing” into the rest of central Europe is provided via the Swiss. Eyeballing that first Red segment, it looks like a “splice” step function higher about 1865. There is a bit more “lift”, but not much, from continued thermometer changes until “the usual” 1980 bump up and 1990 “bullseye” change of “Duplicate Numbers” (as NCDC calls them). That last segment getting a much steeper warming trend line; and notice how the ‘low going” peaks are much more clipped. Barely reaching -5 C where in prior history they reached -7 C and the occasional -8 C. Looking at the post 1980 part of the graph, the ‘density’ of lines above zero is higher than that below zero. It looks like the overall volatility is reduced but with the bottoms clipped more than the tops.
A comparison of the adjustment and QA processes applied to Swiss data as compared to Hungarian or German or even Austrian ought to yield some interesting insights…
And then we have Poland. I can just hear the “Polish Joke Books” being opened… I’d expected Poland to be either like Germany (no trend) or Ukraine (no trend) since it is bracketed between them. But no…
A wonderfully long thermometer history, starting in 1780. It begins with a very steep warming trend before the industrial revolution (as do several places with long histories, though when you get back to 1720 it is warm again in Sweden). Then Poland stabilizes from about 1836 to the end of World War Two. Next we get a similar step function higher to that seen in Czech (and again one wonders if calibration was different under Soviet guidance…) yet with a falling trend line. Then a “step function” higher still at the “bullseye” in 1990 during The Great Dying of Thermometers. Yet the trend line goes to nearly dead flat. Just amazing.
So I’m left to presume that “warming” in Germany and Ukraine in the GISS anomaly maps is “courtesy” of Poland and Switzerland, but with a little “lift” from Czech and Slovakia.
I think it’s pretty clear that each country has it’s own “issues”. The averaging and “homogenizing” of all these different countries together might well give a net “warming trend”, but it will not be because these places are all warming. It will be because some of them play with their instruments.
It is also pretty clear from the disjoint nature of the ‘step functions’ in nearby countries that it is not due to some general weather pattern shift in the region. Things happen “by country” and neither CO2 nor regional weather shifts (like the AO or AMO) can do that.