Climate stripes are a powerful visual tool for raising awareness about climate change impacts. Thanks to CMCC’s research, it is now possible to visualize temperature changes with high-resolution data across all Italian regions and provinces, offering communities the detailed insights needed to develop tailored responses to local climate challenges.

The Dataclime platform now offers climate stripes, open and accessible to all, that showcase temperature variations across all Italian regions and provinces. This tool, based on very high spatial resolution data (approximately 2.2 km) produced and published by CMCC, stands out for its exceptional detail and completeness.

Climate stripes, first designed by climatologist Ed Hawkins in 2018, are a visual tool now widely used to depict global warming and raise awareness of climate change, even among non-experts in the field, such as journalists, students, and administrators.

Until now, climate stripes have usually been available at the global or national level. Now, thanks to Dataclime, CMCC is bringing them to a local scale, making them available for every Italian region and province, thanks to very high-resolution climate data.

They are designed to raise awareness on the fact that adaptation strategies happen on a local scale, and require targeted actions that address the specific needs of each area.

“This shift to the local level is an important step forward in climate change information and awareness, as it allows us to visualize impacts clearly and precisely in a local context,” said Paola Mercogliano, CMCC researcher and Dataclime coordinator. “The climate stripes we have developed are designed to give a visual representation of temperature changes at local scales, communicating this information in a way that can be easily understood and received by the public. In this way, we want to help foster understanding of climate change affecting specific contexts, and provide reliable and detailed data and information to all actors in society, including stakeholders and administrations, to support adaptation actions at the local level. The initiative has already attracted great interest among various companies, NGOs and administrations, confirming climate stripes as an effective means of communication and awareness raising in society.”

Climate Stripes: the barcode of global warming

The climate stripes available on Dataclime for Italian regions and provinces describe the increase in temperatures over the Italian territory during the period from 1981 to 2023. They are a visual representation of average, minimum and maximum temperature changes through a color range from blue to red. Each stripe reflects the temperature anomaly relative to the average for the reference period:

• Blue: temperatures below the 30-year average.
• Red: temperatures above the 30-year average.

This tool allows the user to visualize temperature trends in a simple and intuitive way, clearly showing how different areas in Italy are already experiencing climate change, highlighting an increasing trend in average temperatures in Italy, with increasingly red stripes in recent years.

The Dataclime portal allows the climate stripes to be viewed and downloaded, both in dynamic mode and as downloadable files. The data used come from the CMCC Data Delivery System, an advanced platform for consulting and sharing climate data, where they are available for free download. These data are produced and published by CMCC and widely used by the Italian scientific community to conduct climate change impact and adaptation studies.

The Dataclime platform

The new feature is just the latest addition to the Dataclime platform, developed by the CMCC Foundation and already used by more than 500 users, including local governments, research organizations and companies. Dataclime’s goal is to transform climate data into practical and immediately usable information for everyone to support climate change adaptation. With advanced features, it allows data to be customized and analyzed according to specific needs, supporting public and private decision-makers at all levels, from local to national scales.

In addition to climate stripes, the platform offers detailed maps of expected climate scenarios, with information on temperature, heavy rainfall and heat waves, for informed climate change management. Dataclime’s continuous development is made possible by international research projects and co-design activities with public and private entities, which collaborate on a global scale.

How to access the service

To view Climate Stripes related to your region or province:

1. Register on Dataclime.com.
2. Log in to the service and select the region and province of interest.
3. The climate stripes are available for both interactive viewing and downloading.