Climate Normals is the 30-year average of a particular variable’s measurements, calculated for a uniform time period. Climate normals are derived from weather and climate observations captured by weather stations.
United States Updates Its Climate Normals to 1991-2020 Baseline
New Delhi (ABC Live India): The U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration has updated the U.S. Climate Normals to
the 1991-2020 baseline period to provide a most recent baseline for
climate information and services to climate-sensitive sectors and a standard
reference to compare variations in temperature, precipitation etc to the
30-year average.
The move is in line with a World Meteorological
Organization recommendation that the 30-year standard reference
periods should be updated every decade in order to better reflect the changing
climate and its influence on our day-to-day weather experience.
Until the end of 2020, the most current and widely used standard
reference period for calculating climate normals was the 30-year period
1981-2010. WMO’s recent Services Commission meeting recommended that the
new 30-year baseline, 1991-2020, should be adopted globally and pledged support
to Members to help them update their figures. Many countries in Europe have
already switched to the new baseline.
Rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are
changing the Earth’s climate much faster than before. As a result,
decision-makers in climate-sensitive sectors and industries such as water
management, energy, agriculture and viticulture may be basing important
decisions on information that may be out of date.
Thus, it is necessary to update the climate normals for
operational services for decision-making, for example for as forecasts of peak
energy load and recommendations on crop selection and planting times.
However, for the
purposes of historical comparison and climate change monitoring, WMO
still recommends the continuation of the 1961-1990 period for the computation
and tracking global climate anomalies relative to a fixed and common reference
period.
For the purpose of Paris Agreement on climate change and its
temperature targets, WMO also uses the pre-industrial era as the baseline for
tracking global temperature increase in its annual State of the
Global Climate report. Thus, the average global temperature in 2020
was about 1.2 °C above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) level.
“The decadal update is the equivalent of the Census for those
who use the data,” said NOAA.
Today’s increasingly powerful computers and climate data
management systems make it much easier to conduct more frequent updates, which
involve analyzing massive amounts of climate data. Another advantage of decadal
updates is that they will make it possible to incorporate data from newly
established weather stations into the normals more rapidly.
As anticipated, changes have occurred in averages since the last
ten-year update, according to NOAA. An upward shift in temperature averages is
evident.
“The influence of long-term global warming is obvious: the
earliest map in the series has the most widespread and darkest blues, and the
most recent map has the most widespread and darkest reds. Today, the normal
annual temperatures across the country are warmer than the 20th-century average
virtually everywhere. From 1901-1930, the annual average temperature was mostly
colder than the 20th-century average,” according to a
NOAA news blog explaining the changes.
Warming is not ubiquitous across the contiguous U.S. in either
geographic space or time of year. Changes vary from season-to-season and
month-to-month.
For instance, the north-central U.S. Temperature Normals—for those in the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest—have cooled from 1981–2010 to 1991–2020, especially in the spring. The South and Southwest are considerably warmer. Normals were also generally warmer across the West and along the East Coast. Precipitation-wise, the Southwest was drier; wetter averages emerged in the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains, especially the Southeast in the spring.
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