Climate extremes are a risk to nearly every aspect of society: they endanger economies, infrastructure, ecosystems and human health. Explore Climdex is designed to help researchers and other stakeholders discover observational data on climate extremes, as well as to show users the work being done with this data.
In Data mode, users can explore 20th and 21st century weather station-based observations of climate extremes from the GHCNDEX dataset. Meanwhile, Stories mode guides users through interesting aspects of the data, as well as highlighting the important work in climate extremes.
Explore Climdex was developed by James Goldie for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. It is powered by Leaflet and GeoServer. Tiles are © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap (reprojected by GBIF). It also uses icons from Font Awesome.
The indices available on this site are annual statistics of weather. They answer questions like:
As well as being calculated over the full year, some indices are available for a given month—the hottest day each January, for example.
Climdex aims to produce a suite of in situ and gridded land-based global datasets of indices representing the more extreme aspects of climate. The project also aims to develop software tools to allow users to access the resulting datasets via a Web interface.
Climdex is developed and maintained by researchers at the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC), The University of New South Wales (UNSW) funded by the Australian Research Council and the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency through Linkage project LP100200690 and in collaboration with the University of Melbourne, Climate Research Division (Environment Canada) and NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (USA).