Except for Canada, sea level change is dominant in all the graphs (red line). The other four countries show similar trends, either in terms of growth or when the phenomena began (around the mid-1990s). Portugal and Spain have seen the largest increases, with the anomaly now more than 4.5 standard deviations from its mean of 0. In the United States, it is currently at a level of about 3.5, and in France around 1.5. The sea level anomaly in Canada experienced a sharp cyclical decline in the late 1990s, and has never caught up with the United States since. Note that ocean and sea level changes are region-dependent within these countries. The literature also highlights longer-term cycles in sea level changes, which are not captured by 30-year reference periods such as the ACI (see Pineau-Guillou et al., 2021). Furthermore, it is unclear how changes in oceans and sea levels affect the climate of inland regions. For all these reasons, it is difficult to draw general conclusions about trends, other than the significance of the change in the standardized sea level variable after the reference period, and the fact that Canada's colder coastal waters appear to be less impacted than the other four countries.
The other dominant change, for all five graphs, concerns the maximum temperatures (green curve). The warmest temperature anomalies are currently between 1 and 2, with switzerland phone number list again larger swings in the United States and Canada than in the other three graphs. The standardized low temperature anomaly component essentially shows a mirror trend to that of the maximum temperatures, thus on negative values. In other words, both contribute significantly to the increase in their respective composite indices.
For southern European countries such as France, Spain and Portugal, the impacts of the other components (precipitation, drought, wind power) are less. We can conclude that the increases in these indices are mainly due to sea level and the high and low temperature components.
In contrast, North America experienced a significant increase in maximum five-day precipitation after the reference period. Its increasing trend shows some periodicity. Regarding droughts, the land areas of the United States and Canada are very large, with each region experiencing different dry spells. Overall, the drought component does not show a clear trend, but remained slightly lower after the reference period. Thus, both the trends in the precipitation and drought components indicate wetter weather in the United States and Canada, compared to France or the Iberian Peninsula.
Although the contribution of each component of the Actuaries Climate Index™ differs due to the distinct geography of each country, their composite indices show a similar upward trend.