Beyond the Data Blog

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

Welcome to the sprung forward part of our calendar. (yawns) I'm really sorry about that. I didn't sleep well last night. If you’re one of the thousands of Americans who strolled into your first appointment about 56 minutes late today, I feel your pain. Been there, done that! So, let’s protest the onset of Daylight Saving Time by springing back. Take that, clocks! Today’s Beyond the Data will look back into some of the supplemental information attached to our February / Winter State of the Climate reports. Insider tip: the fun stuff is always in the supplemental information. We’ll pull out some fun regional trivia, but there’s at least one lesson about the climate system…   Read article

In the last few weeks, my colleague Karin Gleason and her colleagues around the country finalized a number of state climate extremes records and reports. Some of these were recent record-breaking events; some were recently discovered as data continue to be liberated from paper into the digital world; and some were backlogged because somebody had let them linger too long (here’s where I blush and stare at my shoes). Here’s what Karin and Friends determined in the last month or so: The 4.75” diameter hailstone that fell in Minooka, Illinois, in June 2015 was indeed the largest retrieved and reported in the Illinois record. The 199 mph wind gust observed on Ward Peak in Febr…   Read article

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) tracks U.S. weather and climate events that have great economic and societal impacts (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions). Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 219 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index, as of December 2017). The cumulative costs for these 219 events exceed $1.5 trillion. During 2017, the U.S. experienced a historic year of weather and climate disasters.  In total, the U.S. was impacted by 16 separate billion-dollar disaster events including: three tropical cyclones, eight severe storms, two inland floods, a …   Read article