Anyone who listens to weather reports has heard meteorologists comment that yesterday's temperature was 3 degrees above normal, or last month was much drier than normal. But what does ânormal" mean in this context â and in a world in which the climate is changing?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released updated âclimate normals" â datasets that the agency produces every 10 years to give forecasters and the public baseline measurements of average temperature, rainfall and other conditions across the U.S. As the state climatologist and assistant state climatologist for Colorado, we work with this information all the time. Here's what climate normals are, how they've changed, and how you can best make sense of them.