The network that stopped

The published Pacific temperature record, 1850 to 2025, above the 56 weather stations measuring it

Two halves sharing one time axis from 1850 to 2026. The upper band is the mean surface temperature anomaly published for the region, an unweighted mean of 22 country series, complete for every year from 1850 and rising from about −0.15 °C in the 1850s to +0.57 °C in the 2020s. The lower field is the ground network the region owns: 56 land weather stations, one thread each, beginning the year that station was installed and running to today. The field is empty until 1889 and holds a single thread until 1930, so 1,760 of the 3,872 published observations — 45.5 per cent — come from years the region had one station or none. Five countries installed their last station before 1970, Tuvalu in 1947 and Palau in 1948, and Nauru, Niue and Pitcairn have never had one. Five views re-read the same drawing; every figure is also in the data panel as a table.

Data & sources

Every number drawn in this piece, as tables.

Official challenge dataset used

• Meteorological monitoring network (SPC:DF_METEO_MONITOR_NET(1.0)), Pacific Data Hub .Stat Explorer. Number of meteorological monitoring stations by country and year, 1889–2026.
• Mean surface temperature anomalies (SPC:DF_CLIMATE_CHANGE(1.0), indicator ST_ANOM), Pacific Data Hub. Annual anomaly in °C by country, 1850–2025, 22 countries and territories, 3,872 observations with no gaps.

Supplementary data

• Land area (SPC:DF_LAND_USE(1.0), indicator LANDAREA), Pacific Data Hub — used only for the stations-per-area figures. The most recent reported year is used for each country.
• Names from SPC:CL_COM_GEO_PICT. Stations, land area and names retrieved 15 August 2026, the temperature series 27 August 2026, all from stats.pacificdata.org over the SDMX REST API.

What this can and cannot tell you

• No station ever closes here. Every count is monotonically non-decreasing across all 138 years, so these are stations on the books — the piece says the network stopped growing, never that it shrank.
• One thread per station is derived. The year a count first reaches k is the year that country's kth station began; the source carries no station's name or location.
• This ground network is not the whole observing system. Satellites, Argo floats, the TAO/TRITON moorings and ships also measure this ocean. The subject here is what the region owns on its own land.
• The upper band summarises published figures — the unweighted mean of 22 country series, rounded to 0.1 °C at source, with nineteenth-century values modelled from outside the region.
• Zero is a value here, not a gap. Nauru, Niue and Pitcairn appear in every year from 1889 with a recorded 0.

Credits

• Made by Varvara Ingilevich for the Pacific Dataviz Challenge 2026.
• The visual approach — dark immersive ground, glow, texture built from many small marks — is indebted to the data art of Nadieh Bremer. The composition, code and analysis in this piece are its own.