It’s cold out there, in some places
Next week I’m visiting Iowa State University, one of the places where the discipline of statistics was invented. It’s going to be cold — the overnight minimum on Sunday is forecast at -25C — because another of the big winter storms is passing through.
The storms this year have been worse than usual. Minneapolis (where they know from cold) is already up to its sixth-highest number of days with the maximum below 0F (-18C, the temperature in your freezer). The Great Lakes have 88% ice cover, more than they have had for twenty years.
Looking at data from NOAA, this winter has been cold overall in the US, very slightly below the average for the past century or so.
However, that’s just the US. For the northern hemisphere as a whole, it’s been an unusually warm winter, well above historical temperatures
This has been your periodic reminder that weather news, for good reasons, gives you a very selective view of global temperature.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »