Beyond the Data Blog

We live in a warming world. And we often characterize that warming through metrics of temperature. But that’s only a sliver of the story. Another sliver, and perhaps a more consequential one, of the story is the connected increase in atmospheric moisture. Recent months have brought us—yet again—real-world examples of what these increases in moisture can bring. To say it’s been a wet year in the mid-Atlantic is an understatement. Through August, that is to say, before Florence, we were already working on the wettest year on record, or close to it, in much of the region. Once Florence’s rains are factored into the end-of-September analyses, we’ll see much more dark green in the So…   Read article

* { margin: 0; padding: 0; } #page-wrap { width: 620px; margin-left: 0px; position: relative; } a { text-decoration: none; color: black; } .image-link { display: block; width: 620px; height: 480px; position: absolute; top: -512px; left: 0px; } #one { background: url(/sites/default/files/grid-ranks-tmax-201805-620px.gif) no-repeat; z-index: 3; } #two { background: url(/sites/default/files/grid-ranks-prcp-201805-620px.gif) no-repeat; z-index: 2; } #three { background: url(/sites/default/files/grid-ranks-tmin-201805-620px.gif) no-repeat; } #one span { position: absolute; left: 0; bottom: -42px; text-align:center; font-family:"Trebuchet MS", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } #two span { …   Read article

The winter average contiguous U.S. temperature was 1.8°F above average, ranking among the warmest third of the record since 1895. In February record-setting precipitation was observed across the mid- and lower-Mississippi Valley, the Midwest and Northern Rockies. During April, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 48.9°F, 2.2°F below the 20th century average, making it the 13th coldest April on record and the coldest since 1997. These are some recent statistics provided by NOAA’s climate monitoring program at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and are part of the hundreds of climate reports that NCEI has produced in recent decades. Many businesse…   Read article

Average temperature is one of the most used datasets that we provide at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The average temperature data for locations on land have been collected for centuries by the military, automated systems at airports and even volunteers. You will often see these numbers on your local newscast and how they compared to normal each day. These maps work great for a lot of purposes, including highlighting how a month or season compared to average or how temperatures are changing with time, but sometimes they wash out important details. To capture some of these details, we have a lesser known way to utilize daily average temperature: heating and…   Read article

This week’s Beyond the Data edition looks a little more deeply at NCEI’s monthly U.S. climate report for March. Cold season blues...or reds, rather One of the handful of obscure meteorological/climatological seasons is the “cold season,” which in the U.S. runs from October through March. Now, I know it’s a stretch for a reader in, say, St. Paul to think of  Arizona’s typical  October-through-March average temperature in the upper 40s as a “cold season,” but it's all relative.  For a state where the daytime high in the summer is 92F,  the term "cold season" applies in Arizona, too.  Speaking of Arizona’s “cold season,” this was the warmest such season on…   Read article