Show your Stripes Day on June 21 2025
Posted on 20 June 2025 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom
Every year on 21st June we encourage everyone to participate in “Show your Stripes Day” to start conversations about climate risks and solutions. Springboarding from a crocheted blanket created by fellow University of Reading professor Ellie Highwood, the “warming stripes” graphic was created in 2018 by Prof. Ed Hawkins, who explains the visualization’s purpose in this video:
The “warming stripes” have been embraced around the world as a clear and vivid representation of how the climate is changing– a powerful appeal to urgency in addressing our climate crisis.
From the website of the University of Reading:
What is Show Your Stripes Day?
Show Your Stripes Day is a global moment to share our concern about how the climate is changing and the need for urgent action.
We ask everyone to share the famous “warming stripes”, a powerful visual representation of how temperatures have increased around the world since the industrial revolution. Created by climate scientist Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading, each stripe represents one year. The colours transition from cool blues to warm reds to represent the increases in temperature seen throughout the past 150 years or more.
On 21 June we call on individuals, businesses, and cities around the world to highlight their local climate stripes and share the powerful message they convey.
Why is it important?
Show Your Stripes Day provides a simple, yet impactful way to communicate the reality of climate change. By condensing decades of temperature data into a series of recognisable stripes, it makes understanding global warming accessible to all, from being able to recreate the stripes in schools, to sharing local stripes across social media.
The stripes have also been important for striking up global conversations. In the past, on this day, they have been displayed in a wide range of prominent public spaces, from Times Square, New York, to the While Cliffs of Dover, UK. By displaying the stripes in locations worldwide, people have been inspired to download and share the stripes online and help spread their message.
2024 was the warmest year on record globally. Extreme weather events continue to be seen more frequently around the world. Never has the need to address climate change been more urgent.
Fig 1.: Warming stripes global for 1850 to 2024 (source)
Learn more about Ed Hawkins and his work in the article The scientist who paints the climate written by Sam Illingworth and published in TheBrilliant on May 29.
Prof. Hawkins and couthors (including Highwood!) extend the stripes concept by singling out particular features of Earth’s climate system in their recent paper Warming Stripes Spark Climate Conversations: From the Ocean to the Stratosphere, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. In a nutshell, from the depths of the ocean to the heights of the stratosphere we see the same pattern. It’s a wonderful example of consilience in action and plain sight. It also shows how the upper atmosphere cools, a clear fingerprint for human-caused global warming.
Fig. 2. Warming stripes for the surface and ocean depths (1960–2024) and for different layers of the atmosphere (1979–2024). Anomalies relative to the 1981–2010 period are shown, with different color scales for the atmosphere, upper ocean, and deeper ocean, with these layers separated by the gray horizontal lines. The global surface temperature data are from HadCRUT5. Global average temperatures for tropospheric layers are from RSS, with stratospheric layer global temperatures updated from Steiner et al. (2020). Ocean data are from Met Office Statistical Ocean Reanalysis (MOSORA) (Smith & Murphy 2007), globally averaged for different depth levels. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 106, 5; 10.1175/BAMS-D-24-0212.1
Download and share the stripes, including versions for countries and cities around the world, at www.showyourstripes.info. Get ideas of how to make good use of the image(s) as an individual, schooll or organisation.