Knitting Climate Data Together

Data visualization is more engaging when it's a scarf!

It’s only natural: we tend to think that the climate we knew as a child is the norm. But if we look back 200 years, we can see how things are changing. There’s a movement afoot to knit representations of climate data. It’s a great opportunity to engage people in a conversation about climate change when they comment on your accessories.

Michale Glennon, Science Director of the Adirondack Watershed Institute, realized that a beautiful scarf can easily become a conversation piece. She founded Wool & Water, a “data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin.” In addition to climate change, Wool & Water focuses on road salt contamination and invasive aquatic species in the Adirondack region.

The Champlain Ice Scarf represents over 200 years of National Weather Service data on when Lake Champlain froze over and when it didn’t. Here is the version by Wool & Water. It is nuanced in that it shows how many months the lake was open (unfrozen) each winter.

Champlain Ice Scarf, by Wool & Water

And here is my version, using stripes instead of chevrons (below). My data are simplified: each white row is a year the lake froze over; each blue row is a year it did not. You can see that from 1820 through 1948, the lake was almost always frozen. But from 1949 on, it was much less likely to freeze.

The Champlain Ice Scarf: Stripes version

The Tempestry Project sells knitting kits based on Professor Ed Hawkins’ warming stripes data visualization (see below). Knitters can make scarves, wall hangings, or cowls documenting temperatures over the years in the location of their choice. Yarn colors match temperature ranges, so the same colors represent the same temperatures everywhere.

The “Warming Stripes” visualization of global temperatures, 1815-2017

Tempestries representing daily high temperatures in Utqiagvik, Alaska, in 1925, 2010, and 2016 (left) and Death Valley, California, in 1950 and 2016 (right) Justin Connelly via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0

A Christian group in Australia called Common Grace started a project in 2020 called Knit for Climate Action, creating scarves similar to the Tempestries. Common Grace calls for people to “mix their creativity with their enthusiasm and climate justice and knit scarves that tell the truth of our warming climate.”  

My next project is the Arctic Wildfire Scarf. It will represent 100 years of data on the number of acres burned in Alaska by wildfires. These fires are much more likely to spread as the Arctic becomes warmer and drier in the summer. Climate change also increases lightning strikes in the Arctic, which is usually how the fires start. I will use moss green for years when fewer than a million acres burned (this was the norm for thousands of years), black for years when one to three million acres burned, and flame red for years when over three million acres burned. It’s shaping up to be a handsome scarf despite the challenges of working with three colors.