Tool predicts winter’s end

Data-backed portal anticipates ‘New Summer’ season

A NEW climate tool has predicted the end of winter by 2050, when Australians will experience a warmer season dubbed New Summer.

Academics from The Australian National University School of Art and Design teamed up with the ANU Climate Change Institute on a design project, which takes existing data and communicates the impacts of climate change in a way people can engage with and better understand.

The resulting new climate tool visualises data which shows by 2050, Australians will no longer enjoy winter as they know it today and will experience a new season the designers are calling “New Summer”.

New Summer represents a period of the year where temperatures will consistently peak in many cases well above 40 degrees Celsius for a sustained period.

The tool shows between 1960 and 1990, Toowoomba had a daily maximum temperate of 22.4 degrees.

That will rise to 27 degrees by 2050, the tool predicted.

Using the tool, people can click on thousands of locations to see how the local weather will change by 2050.

“We looked at the historical average temperatures of each season and compared them to the projected data and what we find everywhere is that there’s really no period of a sustained or lasting winter,” said ANU School of Art and Design senior lecturer Dr Geoff Hinchliffe said.

“In 30 years’ time winter as we know it will be non-existent. It ceases to be everywhere apart from a few places in Tasmania.”

The tool, which uses data from the Bureau of Meteorology and Scientific Information for Land Owners, shows how many degrees the average temperature will rise.

“As well as the data, we also focused on developing the most effective visual forms for conveying how climate change is going to affect specific locations,” Dr Hinchliffe said.

“That meant using colour, shape and size around a dial composition showing a whole year’s worth of temperature values in a single snapshot.”

Associate Professor Mitchell Whitelaw said the team concentrated on visualisation and storytelling.

“We don’t want to misrepresent the data or suggest things that aren’t true so the visualisation was instrumental in conveying the data in a way that can be interrogated. It’s like a graph, but more poetic,” he said.

The visual climate tool was prepared for the Australian Conservation Foundation and can be viewed at https://myclimate.acf.org.au