From global stripes to local decisions
June 20, 2026
June 20 is Show Your Stripes Day. This is an annual global awareness campaign dedicated to sparking conversations about climate change. On this day, people around the world can share ‘warming stripes’ that show how their local climate has changed over time. The climate stripes project – a climate science communication initiative by British climatologist Professor Ed Hawkins -allows people to pinpoint locations across the world, and create local temperature change visualisations.
This climate stripes graphic for Hobart shows annual mean temperatures from 1856 to 2025, compared to the 1961–2010 average. Each stripe shows how much warmer or cooler that year was relative to a baseline average (1961–2010). The colours indicate the temperature anomaly (how much warmer or cooler a year was compared to that long-term average). Blue stripes show cooler-than-average years. Red stripes show warmer years. Over time, the colours shift from blue to red, depicting rising annual temperatures as an instantly recognisable trend.
The stripes tell a compelling story, however, they are only a starting point. While climate stripes are based on the observational record of past temperature, to look to the future, we need climate modelling to project how climate change affects specific locations in detail.
For Tasmania, global climate models (GCMs) are too coarse in scale to account for our island’s size, complex topography, and the influence of the surrounding ocean. Here, regional climate models are crucial to enable a better understanding of Tasmania’s future climate.
Climate Futures’ current ‘Climate Projections for Tasmania’ project is modelling future climate by simulating climate processes at fine spatial scale for our island state. The project will assess historical climate conditions and simulate future scenarios, producing downscaled high resolution (~4 km) projections for Tasmania to 2100, based on the most up-to-date GCMs from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). The approach aligns with international best practice in regional climate modelling and downscaling. The project will provide projections for two Shared Socio-economic Pathway (SSP) scenarios, SSP1-2.6 and SSP3-7.0, producing climate data for contrasting low- and high-emissions futures.
The project also intends to make information on future climate as broadly accessible as possible. This means, in addition to the project’s interactive climate data viewer, it will produce a range of interpretative outputs, including reports, infographics, case studies and training resources – all of these tailored to different sectors’ and users’ needs.
The downscaled local climate data this project produces will support better decision-making by government, industry and communities, to be used in planning for climate resilience and adaptation: bridging the gap between global models and local needs.
Show your Stripes Day is an opportunity to consider how climate has already changed – at local and global scales. Visualising recent heating trends is also a prompt for thinking about future climate – and how we can use climate information at local scales to enable adaptation and build resilience.
Projects like ‘Climate Projections for Tasmania’ provide the local detail needed to support informed decisions, now and into the future, to boost Tasmania’s climate change resilience.
