The zero line is the 1961–1990 average — “what used to be normal”. Each bar shows how much warmer or cooler a year was than that. Single years bounce around naturally (that is weather); the dark line smooths them into a 10-year average (that is climate). The dashed line shows the same for the whole planet — land areas like this usually warm faster than the global average, because oceans, two thirds of the planet, heat up more slowly.

Simply the number of days per year on which the thermometer reached 30 °C or more. These days strain bodies, buildings, and crops. Watch how the bars cluster: in many places, what used to be a rare summer event has become an every-year expectation.

Total rain and snow per year, with the old normal as a dashed line. Rainfall naturally varies a lot from year to year, so single bars mean little. One subtle point: even where yearly totals barely change, the landscape can still get drier — because warmer air evaporates more water. That effect is what the drought index below measures.

Each bar is the biggest 24-hour rainfall of that year. Where these bars grow while yearly totals shrink, “more drought” and “more floods” are both true at once — long dry spells, interrupted by harder downpours — and several stories on this site describe exactly that. One honest limit: an actual cloudburst is a sub-hourly event a few kilometres wide, which this ~25 km daily data smooths over. The chart shows the trend that makes such events more likely, not the individual disaster.

The drought index asks: over the last 12 months, did the land receive more water (rain, snow) than the atmosphere took back (evaporation)? Zero means a normal balance for this place. Below −1 counts as drought, below −2 as extreme drought — like a water account sliding into overdraft. Because warmer air is “thirstier”, droughts can deepen even when rainfall stays the same. SPEI is a standard scientific measure, so these values are comparable with published drought research.

For each year: the longest unbroken run of days with less than 1 mm of rain — essentially, the longest stretch the landscape had to survive on stored water. Long dry spells stress soils, gardens, and forests even in years whose rainfall total looks normal.

Nights that never cooled below 20 °C. Cool nights are when bodies and buildings shed the day’s heat — when they disappear, heat stress accumulates, sleep suffers, and heatwaves become dangerous, especially for older people. In much of Europe these nights barely existed a generation ago.

The top chart shows every single day of the past year against what used to be typical for that calendar day: the grey band covers the range where roughly two of three days used to land. Days above it were unusually warm for their date, days below unusually cool — the line’s color shows the departure. The middle chart adds up rain through the year: if the solid line runs below the dashed one, the year has been drier than a normal year. The bottom row shows the drought account balance for each of the last 12 months.

Climate models are excellent at physics but cannot know future human choices — how much CO₂ the world will emit depends on policy and technology. So scientists compute “what if” storylines instead. This chart follows the high-emission storyline (“no further climate action”): the grey line is what actually happened; the orange line is where three high-resolution models say this place would head under that storyline, and the band shows how much the models disagree. Individual future years are plausible weather, not forecasts — only the trend is meaningful. Which pathway humanity takes is a choice, not a physics problem.