Fairbanks Temperature Anomalies

First of all, a big thanks to Brian and Richard for keeping DEEP COLD the blog, going. It's definitely become a collaborative endeavor.

Temperatures in Fairbanks have been much more variable lately than we've seen much of the past year. Here's an update (through Dec 20) of my usual standardized temperature departure graphics. Recall that standardizing is just a way of doing an "apples to apples" comparison for things like Interior Alaska temperatures were the potential variability differs greatly from winter to summer.

The top plot is the standardized anomaly of the daily mean temperature. The bottom plot is the 5-day running mean  temperature standardized anomaly. For more than a month now temperatures have been on a bit of a yo-yo, with only the mild weather early this month standing out in the 5-day running mean. Just eyeballing the daily plot, the only somewhat similar time to the current swings was mid-August to mid-September, though this is less evident when looking at the 5-day plot.