For the past couple of decades, the weather hasn’t felt as predictable as it used to. In one year, it’s hot; the next, there are even more weather calamities. And we often wonder what the next season will bring? This thought led me to search, and I came across a website that shows all those changes in one place, www.showyourstripes.info—a site with climate changes displayed in stripes just like a colourful barcode.

The whole point of the site is to let you generate and download a “warming stripes” graphic — basically a barcode-looking image where each stripe is one year of temperature data for a location. Blue stripes represent cooler years while red stripes represent warmer years. You start in the 1800s on the left and go to the present on the right. For most countries, the stripes start around 1901 and go up to 2023.

The main menu is at the top with “Stripes,” “Map,” and other interactive sections. By default, the site is on “Stripes.” You start by picking your location from the panel on the left. Then pick your country and for some places you can even go down to a specific region or state. Once you’ve selected your location, the stripes appear accordingly. The “Map” view lets you browse by clicking around geographically rather than selecting from a list.

The red stripes indicate hotter years and blue stripes indicate cooler years, relative to the average of the 1961–2010 period. The more red you see stacking up toward the right side (recent decades), the starker the trend. Some regions are genuinely shocking, especially the Arctic. What shocked and surprised me was the change in stripe colour according to our country and region; the overall shift in left to right made me wonder how the climate on the globe has been changing at a rapid pace.

This is one of those rare sites where the design does all the talking and you get the data visually and immediately. There is no clutter, pop-ups or ads. And the data sources are also genuine, such as Berkeley Earth, NOAA, UK Met Office, MeteoSwiss and Germany’s DWD depending on the country.

However, the site needs a little explanatory text with every country or region. First-timers might find it a bit difficult so they need to spend some time understanding the colours before they grasp the idea behind the site.

The site is useful if you want to see how climate has changed in different places, whether for research or just curiosity.

So go find your country, look at the stripes and download the image.

Visit: https://showyourstripes.info/

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 18th, 2026