“Almost every place in the U.S. has warmed from the 1981 to 2010 normal to the 1991 to 2020 normal,” said Michael Palecki, NOAA’s normals project manager.
Fargo, North Dakota, where the new normal is a tenth of a degree cooler than the old one, is an exception, but more than 90% of the U.S. has warmer normal temperatures now than 10 years ago, Palecki said.
In Chicago and Asheville, North Carolina, the new yearly normal temperature jumped 1.5 degrees in a decade. Seattle, Atlanta, Boston and Phoenix had their normal annual temperature rise by at least half a degree in the last decade.
Climate data shows America s normal temperature a degree hotter than 2 decades ago sun-sentinel.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sun-sentinel.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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America’s new normal temperature is a degree hotter than it was just two decades ago.
Scientists have long talked about climate change hotter temperatures, changes in rain and snowfall and more extreme weather being the “new normal.” Data released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put hard figures on the cliche.
The new normal in the United States is not just hotter, but wetter in the eastern and central parts of the nation and considerably drier in the West than just a decade earlier.
Meteorologists calculate climate normals based on 30 years of data to limit the random swings of daily weather, a standard set by the World Meteorological Organization. Every 10 years, NOAA updates normal for the country as a whole, for states and for cities by year, month and season.