Thursday May 9th … Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
May U.S. Record Scoreboard Update
The National Climatic Data Center has completed its statistical analysis for the United States for April 2019, so once again its time to check my “Record Scoreboard.” April 2019 got ranked as one of the top 25 Aprils for warmth across the lower 48 states, but was not a month in which there were vastly many more reports of record highs than lows. April was not a month of extremes yet above average temperatures were felt in most locations:
Here is what we see on the daily surface Record Scoreboard updated through 5/7/19 data from:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
For this data set all monthly ratios of > 10 to 1 DHMX to DLMN or > 10 to 1 DLMN to DHMX are in bold type. The rankings are for the lower 48 states with the warmest ranking since 1895 of average temperatures being 125 and 1 being the coldest as of 2019. Blue colors represent cold months and red warm. Those months with counts close to a 1 to 1 ratio of highs to lows are colored black. Boldly colored months, such as May 2018, have ratios of more than 10 to 1 daily record highs to lows or lows to highs, and are either historically hot or cold. April 2019 had a near 7 to 6 ratio of record DHMX to DLMN individual counts, so the color I used for this month was red, although one could make a case for the color black.
NCEI has processed April temperature data across the country, determining that the lower 48 had its 23rd warmest month since 1895, so the number 103 is also added to the chart. The number 103 falls within the upper range of three categories (1-41, 52-72, 73-124), so it is colored red.
So far 2019 resembles 2013 and 2014 statistically as far as record ratios go:
Despite a cold start for 2019 this decade continues to be warmer than the last, the 2000s:
As unusual, I’ll be adding more data to the Record Scoreboard after each consecutive month’s temperature data has been processed by NCEI. We will see what we have for May 2019 by June 8th. So far for May 2018 as depicted on the scoreboard there have been relatively few reports of record temperatures. We will see if that trend continues through 2019 such that the global warming minster stays away from the United States, temperature wise.
Here is more climate and weather news from Thursday.
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
Here is one cold ET report from Thursday:
(If you like these posts and my work please contribute via the PayPal widget, which has recently been added to this site. Thanks in advance for any support.)
Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”