Weather 20 Days At My Location

[Rosita Westhouse]

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Whereas weather refers to short-term changes in the atmosphere, climate describes what the weather is like over a long period of time in a specific area. Different regions can have different climates. To describe the climate of a place, we might say what the temperatures are like during different seasons, how windy it usually is, or how much rain or snow typically falls.

When scientists talk about climate, they're often looking at averages of precipitation, temperature, humidity, sunshine, wind, and other measures of weather that occur over a long period in a particular place. In some instances, they might look at these averages over 30 years. And, we refer to these three-decade averages of weather observations as Climate Normals.

While the weather can change in just a few minutes or hours, climate changes over longer time frames. Climate events, like El Nio, happen over several years, with larger fluctuations happening over decades. And, even larger climate changes happen over hundreds and thousands of years.

Today, climates are changing. Our Earth is warming more quickly than it has in the past according to the research of scientists. Hot summer days may be quite typical of climates in many regions of the world, but warming is causing Earth's average global temperature to increase. The amount of solar radiation, the chemistry of the atmosphere, clouds, and the biosphere all affect Earth's climate.

Climate, climate change, and their impacts on weather events affect people all around the world. Rising global temperatures are expected to further raise sea levels and change precipitation patterns and other local climate conditions. Changing regional climates could alter forests, crop yields, and water supplies. They could also affect human health, animals, and many types of ecosystems. Deserts may expand into existing rangelands, and features of some of our National Parks and National Forests may be permanently altered.

Search for maximum, minimum, and average temperature normals and precipitation total normals for individual station locations from about 15,000 stations across the United States. Find annual/seasonal, monthly, daily, or hourly conventional 30-year normals and 15-year normals normals by station names.

Download CSV versions of the full suite of normals organized by variable or by station in our Web Accessible Folders for Annual/Seasonal, Monthly, Daily, and Hourly normals. More instructions and format information readme files are available in the documentation folders at these sites.

Changes during the core months of each season (January, April, July, and October) can be representative of broader differences between different normals iterations. The following examples illustrate the percent change in precipitation and the change in degrees Fahrenheit in maximum temperature for each core month.

April is the most dynamic core month, and exhibits a variety of significant changes in maximum temperature and precipitation. The maximum temperature normals are considerably lower in the north-central U.S. compared to the previous normals period. The entire northern tier is cooler, but changes reach more than -2F in parts of the Dakotas. Cooling patches reach all the way to Louisiana, although the areas to the west and east of the Mississippi Valley have warmed considerably. The entire southeastern quarter of the U.S. is now considerably wetter in April, while the southwest is drier. Additional precipitation is also seen in the lee of the northern Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes.

The Northwest is considerably drier as a percentage of the previous normal during what is already a dry season. The rest of the West is pockmarked with wetter and drier zones. The eastern two-thirds of the U.S. has an indistinct pattern of changes in the precipitation normals. Most of the East also remained near the same temperature levels, except for persistent cooling in the north central U.S. and warming in the Northeast. However, the entire West and lee of the Rocky Mountains and Texas are all considerably (up to 2) warmer.

Overall, the central month of each season displayed cooling normals in the north-central U.S. to varying degrees, most distinctly in April. Precipitation normals were generally wetter east of the Rockies, and drier in the central and southern West. While annual normals changes were generally consistent, the single months showed pattern shifts that indicate a relationship to repeated preference of certain upper air wind patterns and storm tracks that shifted north or south with the seasons. The patterns of normals changes are following spatial trends in climate circulation dynamics and surface feedbacks, but still demonstrate the warmer conditions expected in the U.S. overall and the reduction of precipitation in the West and increase in precipitation in the East as anticipated by models of future climate change

For example, the maximum temperature record for the KOKC station developed a substantial warming deviation from other nearby stations during early 2017 (see KOCK Oklahoma City - January Maximum Temperature).

The third file has a spreadsheet that compares annual maximum and minimum temperature normals between the three categories for quick station-to-station comparisons. Columns are labelled and normals are in tenths of degrees F.

In addition to basic averages for temperature, precipitation, and snowfall, more than 500 separate types of weather and climate statistics are available as part of the U.S. Normals dataset. Some are well known metrics like heating and cooling degree days, growing season length for various temperature thresholds, numbers of days with precipitation or with temperatures below freezing, etc. Other statistics are less well known, but are needed by various user communities, including percentiles and probabilities of key variables. All available variables serve a purpose, and are described in more detailed documentation available through the Data Access tool.

During the year following the initial release of the 1991-2020 station-based U.S. Climate Normals in May 2021, National Weather Service Forecast Offices submitted inquiries regarding the Normals at a total of 60 stations. Staff at NCEI carefully adjudicated each inquiry in collaboration with its NWS partners. At 21 stations, NWS staff was able to provide data additions and corrections, and NCEI staff recalculated or added the affected normals parameters based on the updated data records. In most cases, changes the monthly normals were

The nClimGrid monthly data provides a nearly homogenous temperature time series and a serially complete precipitation record. Unlike complex station climate normals, monthly gridded normals are simple averages of the maximum temperature, minimum temperature, mean temperature, and precipitation totals for each month of the year.

Figure 1: An example of 1991-2020 monthly gridded normals for April mean temperature (F) and precipitation (inches). The data are found in four netCDF files for each normal or baseline set, one each for maximum temperature, minimum temperature, mean temperature, and precipitation. Each data file is approximately 275 MB.

The variables available as daily normals include daily maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures and daily average, month-to-date, and year-to date precipitation totals. The same smoothing methods that are used to generate daily normals for observation stations have been applied to the values for each grid cell to make them transition smoothly from one day to another. The daily temperature normals are constrained so their monthly averages equal the monthly temperature normals, and the daily precipitation normals are adjusted to total to the monthly precipitation normals.

ENSO Normals 2020 is a monthly climatology product that covers the contiguous United States. These monthly climate normals are provided for five different phase categories of ENSO: Strong La Nia, Weak La Nia, Neutral, Weak El Nio, and Strong El Nio. The resulting climatologies are centered around a 15-yr running average (instead of the traditional 30-year normal) to account for the impacts of climate change. Arguez et al. (2019) describes the methods used to generate the ENSO normals in detail.

The product suite includes monthly climate normals of daily maximum temperature, daily minimum temperature, and precipitation. In addition to the monthly ENSO-adjusted normals, quantile values are provided for the 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentiles. The product is intended for users in climate-sensitive industries and activities to plan for a broad array of possible ENSO impacts in a changing climate.

During the temperature data homogenization process, abrupt but real changes in sea ice on the west and northern coasts of Alaska could be mistaken for artificial air temperature changes at stations close to the coast (north of 70N or west of 160W). To address this issue, we replaced the homogenized temperature records with original observations that were quality controlled but not homogenized, and reran the normals process.

Normals at 18 stations within this zone were slightly modified. In addition, normals for 7 stations near the zone were under the influence of the coastal stations for filling missing data or estimating normals, and also had changed values.

New temperature normals for impacted stations include annual/seasonal, monthly, and daily temperature normals and temperature-related normals (seasonal variables, exceedance counts, etc.) for both 1991-2020 and 2006-2020. The quick access tool will have the changes available for temperature averages, while the full access tool can extract all temperature variables. New versions of files containing Alaska temperature normals have been uploaded to our Web Accessible Folders that contain the entire dataset, including both by-variable and by-station bulk files.

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