It’s been a very busy year. One of the consequences of that busyness is that I’ve neglected to track the weather as close as I prefer. Tonight I ran through the F6 from the Birmingham National Weather Service (NWS) station. The F6 is more widely known as the PRELIMINARY LOCAL CLIMATOLOGICAL DATA form. The data in these forms are in all CAPS for some reason. One day I’ll look into why that is the case. Anyway, as I was saying, my investigations into the first nine months F6 forms and my comparison to the current Climate Normals yielded some interesting “headlines” for this years weather.
First a small digression to provide a salient definition. “Climate Normals” are the current 30 year average of weather for each month of the year. The current Climate Normals are comprised of the averages from the years 1981-2010. Every ten years the NWS puts out a new dataset. In the year 2021 they will deliver the next range of years for Climate Normals: 1991-2020.
These Climate Normals are precisely what climate is: a thirty year average of thousands of weather measurements at the Birmingham NWS station. Every NWS station utilizes a set of data from which they derive their own Climata Normals. Using the Climate Normals and comparing them to our current year’s weather is the motivation behind this evening’s blog post.
The first “headline” this data produces is: “The Month of February is Missing from Calendar Year 2018”. Well, my calendar has February in it, and so does yours, so what does this headline mean? It’s actually quite simple. If you take the average highs and lows for this year’s February they are almost identical to the average highs and lows for the month of March found in the Climate Normals. This year’s weather just skipped the February temperatures and went from January to March temperatures. And since this year’s March was just barely warmer then the March of the Climate Normals, this year we got double the fun! Two month’s of March weather.
The second “headline” this year is that the May-September period was hotter than the Climate Normals. This extended warm spell started out wet (6.98” in May) but ended up dryer than normal. July only saw 1.81” of rain at the bottom of the rain gauge.
The third “headline” this year is that the weather in September was a clone of August. So, this year we got two month’s of August weather, and that was following a July that was noticeably hotter than the Climate Normal. As a matter of fact this year’s September was warmer than this year’s August!
The fourth “headline” this year is a continuation of the last one. “September is Hotter than the Normal July”. Now everyone around here knows that July is the hottest month of the year. August is the second hottest month, followed by June. This year’s September’s temperatures were as hot as or hotter than the Climate Normal July. What we are saying here is that you could be more miserably
hot this September than you could in the vast majority of the thirty year’s month of July (1981-2010). Wow, that is hot!
The year is not over yet! We just started the fourth quarter on October 1st so I’ll have to return to this topic in January for a look back at any future “headlines”. Until then, keep your eye on the sky.
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