Climatologists at NOAA have released updated climate "normals." They explain what "normal" means, how our U.S. climate normals have changed, and how to best make sense of them.
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.
“The unprecedented aspects of 2020 included our climate in North Carolina, which the statistics show was an extreme year in our modern history.”
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Corey Davis, Assistant State Climatologist of North Carolina, and Kathie Dello, State Climatologist of North Carolina and director of the North Carolina State Climate Office at NC State University.
“According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, 2020 was our second-wettest year on record and tied for our third-warmest year on record dating back to 1895. That makes 2020 the only time in the past 126 years with both our annual temperatures and precipitation ranked in the top five.
“Perhaps more unusual than the rankings themselves is the story of how we got there: a persistent warm and wet pattern that was defined not by a single event, but by the sum of its parts.”