Investigating the Climate Trends in Daily Temperature and Wind Speed for New England Over the Past 50 Years (1973-2022)

Climate studies have shown that the Northeast is one of the fastest warming regions in the United States. We investigated the temperature and wind speed trends in New England over the span of 50 years from 1973 to 2022 using station observations from the NOAA Climate Data Online (CDO) repository. The stations were filtered out based on observation availability: data availability in the full date range and at least 80% data coverage. The selected stations are located in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Time series of daily maximum and minimum temperature, average wind speed, and fastest two-minute wind speed were detrended to isolate the climate signal. In addition, we calculated the trends for each percentile (5th to 95th) accompanying them with statistical significance tests. In our findings for temperature, both daily maximum temperature and daily minimum temperature presented a statistically significant increasing trend. In our findings for wind, the fastest two-minute wind speed was not statistically significant and revealed no positive or negative trend. However, average daily wind speed showed a statistically significant decreasing trend. Overall, these observed trends indicate significant changes for both wind and temperature which can aid the assessment of future climate projections as well as signal new characteristics associated with each season for the New England region.