Hot events in Malaysia

Key points of post

• On Penang Island, the number of particularly hot days at or above 35⁰C has reduced since 1975, while near Kuala Lumpur, in the Klang Valley (Subang Weather Station) the trend has been strongly upwards.
• Long-term changes in average temperatures are not necessarily related to the number of hot events.

Commonly in reports and papers about climate change it is stated that, ‘climate variability and the number extreme events (very hot days, typhoons) has increased in the past and will continue to do so in the future’ but we wonder whether or not it is actually true everywhere.  

Jason recently chanced upon a post published on RPubs by James Elsner that produced analyses to examine this question. We decided to adopt this approach to examine whether or not the frequency of exceptionally hot days on Penang Island has actually gone up over the last few decades.  We know from our previous post that average air temperatures have increased and I (Doug) naively assumed that this must be true also for extremely hot days. Not so, however. In the picture below, using data from Bayan Lepas airport, we plot the number of days when air temperature was at or above 35⁰C at least once (top), the average duration of those hot periods (middle), and the number of such hot events with a line summarizing long-term trend (bottom). Clearly the number of such extreme events has gone down, contrary to popular wisdom about the effects of climate change. Interestingly the middle plot which summarizes successive days which had maximum temperatures of 35⁰C or more show that the average is only 1 day, the exception occurring in 2002 which had an average of 2. Surprisingly the average temperatures as shown in our post from February, were unexceptional.

But have the numbers of hot events decreased everywhere in Malaysia? At the Subang Weather Station, near Kuala Lumpur the answer is an emphatic, “No”. In 1998 which was a hot year (also see average air temperatures) there were 86 days when temperatures (at least once) were at or above 35⁰C when the average contiguous duration of hot days was ~ 2.5.  We don’t know the reason for these differences. The point is to be aware that these sort of differences exist. Subang located in the Klang Valley (refer to location map above) is inland, and is much less influenced by the moderating effects of the sea than Penang Island.  Differential ‘urban heat island’ effects may also be a factor. Or it could even be climate change.

I know where I’d rather live!

The R code used to produce the plots are shown below and the hourly weather data was again sourced from NOAA's National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC).

# Load required packages
 
library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
library(plyr)
library(dplyr)
library(reshape2)
library(lubridate)
library(grid)
library(zoo)
library(gridExtra)
 
# Setting work directory
 
setwd("d:\\ClimData")
 
# Reading and reformatting raw daily data downloaded from NCDC
 
dat<-read.table("CDO2812586929956.txt",header=F,skip=1)
 
colnames(dat)<-c("stn","wban","yearmoda","temp","tempc","dewp","dewpc","slp","slpc","stp","stpc","visib","visibc","wdsp","wdspc","mxspd","gust","maxtemp","mintemp","prcp","sndp","frshtt")
 
dat$yearmoda <- strptime(dat$yearmoda,format="%Y%m%d")
 
# Create date columns
 
dat$dates <- as.Date(dat$yearmoda)
 
dat$year <- as.numeric(format(dat$yearmoda,"%Y"))
dat$month <- as.numeric(format(dat$yearmoda,"%m"))
dat$day <- as.numeric(format(dat$yearmoda,"%d"))
dat$monthf <- factor(dat$month,levels=as.character(1:12),labels=c("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug","Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"),ordered=TRUE)
 
# Remove erronous values & convert units
 
dat$maxtemp[dat$maxtemp == 9999.9 ] <- NA
dat$mintemp[dat$mintemp == 9999.90 ] <- NA
 
dat$tempdc <- (dat$temp-32) * (5/9)
 
dat$maxtemp <- gsub("[*]","", dat$maxtemp) 
dat$mintemp <- gsub("[*]","", dat$mintemp) 
 
dat$maxtemp <- as.numeric(dat$maxtemp)
dat$mintemp <- as.numeric(dat$mintemp)
 
dat$maxtempc <- (dat$maxtemp-32) * (5/9)
dat$mintempc <- (dat$mintemp-32) * (5/9)
 
dat$maxtempc[is.na(dat$maxtempc)] <- as.numeric(dat$tempdc[is.na(dat$maxtempc)])
 
dat$mintempc[is.na(dat$mintempc)] <- as.numeric(dat$tempdc[is.na(dat$mintempc)])
 
str(dat)
 
dat<- dat[-c(3)]
 
# Subset data from 1975 onwards
 
dat <- subset(dat, year > 1975)
 
## Create a data frame table
 
dat = tbl_df(dat)
 
hd = dat %>% 
  group_by(year) %>%
  summarize(N35 = sum(maxtempc >= 35, na.rm = TRUE),
            N34 = sum(maxtempc >= 35, na.rm = TRUE),
            avgTmaxC = mean(maxtempc, na.rm = TRUE))
 
c1 <- ggplot(hd, aes(x = year, y = N35, fill = N35)) + 
      theme_bw() + 
      geom_bar(stat='identity') + 
      scale_fill_continuous(low='orange', high='red') +
      geom_text(aes(label = N35), vjust = 1.5, size = 3) +
      scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(1975, 2015, 5)) +
      ylab("Days\n") +
      xlab("") +
      ggtitle("Number of days at or above 35°C\n")+
      theme(axis.text.x  = element_text(size=11), legend.position="none",
      panel.background=element_blank(),
      axis.title.x=element_text(size=7,colour="grey20"),
      panel.grid.major = element_line(colour = "grey",size=0.25,linetype='longdash'),
      axis.text.x=element_text(size=10,colour="grey20",face="bold"),
      plot.title = element_text(lineheight=1, face="bold",size = 12, colour = "grey20"))
 
c1
 
# Determine hot events
 
hotEvents = rle(dat$maxtempc >= 35)
eventLength = hotEvents$lengths[hotEvents$values]
eventNo = rep(1:length(eventLength), eventLength)
Events.df = subset(dat, maxtempc >= 35)
Events.df$eventNo = eventNo
 
# Determine the number of days between successive 35C days. Add this as another column.
 
t1 = Events.df$dates[-length(Events.df$dates)]
t2 = Events.df$dates[-1]
dd = difftime(t2, t1, units = "days")
Events.df$dbe = c(NA, dd)
Events.df = Events.df %>% select(maxtempc, mintempc, dates, year, month, eventNo, dbe)
 
# Length and intensity of events
 
LI.df = Events.df %>%
  group_by(eventNo) %>%
  summarize(eventLength = length(maxtempc),
            avgEventT = mean(maxtempc),
            maxEventT = max(maxtempc),
            whenMaxEvT = which.max(maxtempc),
            Year = year[1])
 
cor(LI.df$eventLength, LI.df$maxEventT)
 
ggplot(LI.df, aes(x = eventLength, y = whenMaxEvT)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_smooth(method = "lm") +
  xlab("Event Length (days)") +
  ylab("Day of Event When Maximum Occurs") +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = 1:10) +
  theme_bw()
 
# Average length of hot events
 
LI.df2 = LI.df %>%
  group_by(Year) %>%
  summarize(count = length(Year),
            avgEL = mean(eventLength))
 
AllYears = data.frame(Year = 1975:2014)
LI.df3 = merge(AllYears, LI.df2, by = "Year", all.x = TRUE)
LI.df3$count[is.na(LI.df3$count)] = 0
 
# Number of hot events

suppressMessages(library(MASS))

ne <- ggplot(LI.df3, aes(x = Year, y = count)) +
      geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
      ylab("Count\n") +
      scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(1975, 2015, 5)) +
      ggtitle("Number of Hot Events in Penang since 1975\n")+
      stat_smooth(method = "glm.nb",formula = y ~ x, data = LI.df3, se = TRUE) + 
      theme_bw()+
      theme(legend.position = "none",
      axis.text.x  = element_text(size=11), legend.position="none",
      panel.background=element_blank(),
      axis.title.x=element_text(size=12,colour="grey20"),
      panel.grid.major = element_line(colour = "grey",size=0.25,linetype='longdash'),
      axis.text.x=element_text(size=10,colour="grey20",face="bold"),
      plot.title = element_text(lineheight=1, face="bold",size = 12, colour = "grey20"))
 
ne
 
var(LI.df3$count)/mean(LI.df3$count)
 
summary(glm.nb(count ~ Year, data = LI.df3))
 
## Export file to png
 
png(file="Hot_Events_Penang_1975-2014.png",width = 12, height = 10, units = "in",
    bg = "white", res = 500, family = "", restoreConsole = TRUE,type = "cairo")
 
grid.arrange(c1,el,ne,ncol=1,main=textGrob("\nHot Events in Penang (Bayan Weather Station) from 1975 - 2014",gp=gpar(fontsize=18,col="grey20",fontface="bold")),sub=textGrob("Source: NOAA National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC)\n",gp=gpar(fontsize=9,col="grey20",fontface="italic")))

dev.off()

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