US Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard
What's New
Everything added to this dashboard since it launched on July 29, 2026, newest first. Weekly data refreshes and the daily satellite image run on their own schedule and are not listed here.
- Agricultural drought added. The Drought page now tracks the share of the contiguous US in a soil-moisture deficit, from NOAA CPC's Monthly Soil Moisture record (1948–present, 3,308 land cells). It reproduces the canonical US droughts without tuning: 1956 and 1954 lead, then 2021, 2002, 1977, 2022 and 2012.
- Four independent drought measures, one page. Soil moisture was the missing fourth alongside the operational US Drought Monitor composite, the SPEI rainfall-minus-evaporation deficit, and hydrologic low flow. Each measures a different deficit; none separates a trend from the year-to-year noise.
- Soil moisture carries the sharpest start-date sensitivity on the site — the slope runs +0.04 percentage points per decade from 1948 but +1.96 from 1990, because the two driest years in the record sit in the 1950s. The full record is used for exactly that reason, and the Methodology page and PDF now cover the new variable.
- Corrections to the Detection & Attribution page. Checking it against the new variable turned up several claims the data no longer supported: warm nights (p=0.102), heavy precipitation extremes and the MTBS large-fire count were each described as a detected increase when the site renders none, and two quoted p-values had moved with the weekly refresh. All are corrected, Cold Extremes gained the AR6 row it had been missing since August, and every claim on the page is now checked against the data on every build -- a future refresh that moves a p-value across a threshold fails the build instead of quietly leaving the wrong sentence up.
- Trend lines suppressed at 30 years or fewer. A record that short no longer gets a fitted trend line, matching the WMO's climate-normal period length. The Every Variable table marks each affected series "time series too short" rather than rendering a detection judgment.
- The Methodology page gained a Data Sources — Attribution & Licensing section naming every provider, the citation each one asks for, and its license terms.
- The Global Extreme Weather Dashboard launched, and the header of every page here now links to it. It applies this site's detection framework to 53 variables across every continent.
- Links to this site now unfurl with a title, description and image when shared.
- New Cold Extremes page: four raw US Historical Climatology Network metrics plus the homogenized nClimGrid cold-spell duration index and annual minimum temperature. Cold extremes also joined the Year in Progress box on the homepage.
- Trend tests now correct for autocorrelation, and every variable reports how many years of record its own noise level would require before a trend could be detected at all (the Weatherhead diagnostic).
- The Every Variable table became sortable by any column, and the homepage gained a daily satellite view of the contiguous US.
- The full variable table moved out of the homepage and onto its own Every Variable tab.
- One source going down no longer stalls the whole weekly refresh — every other variable still updates. Each variable's source is named on the Methodology page.
- Launch
- The dashboard went live at extremeweather.thehonestbroker.org with seven phenomena pages — heat waves, severe convective storms, winter storms, flooding, drought, wildfire and tropical cyclones — each drawn from its official source and tested against the IPCC's own detection threshold.
- Alongside them at launch: Loss Normalization, setting hurricane, tornado and flood losses against growth in population and wealth; Detection & Attribution, placing the NCA4, AR6 and NCA5 conclusions side by side hazard by hazard; and the Methodology page and Bibliography.