Global warming is based on long term global trends. The weather today is not necessarily an indicator of an overall trend and the climate in one part of the world does not always represent the global trend.

To borrow a sports metaphor, in 2013 the overall batting average of Major League Baseball was .250. That means that, on average, there were 25 hits per 100 at bats. That does not mean, however, that each player had one hit for every four times they came to the plate. Within that average there were .300 hitters and .200 hitters. There were bad days when the .300 hitters got no hits and good days when the .200 hitters did very well.

When scientists say that the planet is warming, it means that if you take all of the days, in all of the places the average temperature is rising.

New research from scientists at Florida State University (FSU) has taken a detailed look at land surface warming trends globally over the last 100 years. The research is intended to take a hard look at exactly what impact climate change is having on specific regions.

The research indicates that, generally, the world is getting warmer, however that warming isn’t happening in a uniform way.

“Global warming was not as understood as we thought,” said Zhaohua Wu, an assistant professor of meteorology at FSU in a statement.

Using a newly developed method of analysis Wu and his colleagues examined surface temperature trends for every location on Earth, except Antarctica. They found that the first noticeable warming trends occurred in regions circling the Arctic as well as subtropical regions.

The largest warming trends to date have occurred in the northern midlatitudes. The midlatitudes are the areas between the arctic or antarctic and the tropical regions of the planet.

However, they also found areas of cooling. Areas near the Andes mountains, for example, cooled from 1910 to 1980 and showed no warming at all until the mid 1990s. Some areas south of the equator have shown no warming at all, to date.

Of course this does not mean that these regions will be impervious to the overall impact of global warming. As sea levels rise and weather patterns change, the fact that a particular area’s ground temperature has not increased will provide no protection.

The team is hopeful that their work, which was published in the May 4 edition of Nature Climate Change, will provide greater context to the work of climate scientists.