Sunday, April 27, 2014

Around Alaska in 2014: Temperature Departures

For fun, here's a scatter plot of daily standardized temperature departures (1981-2010 normals) so far for 2014 for Fairbanks, Nome, Anchorage and Juneau. The color scheme here is by terciles, so ±0.43 standard deviations is the cutoff between for the "near normal" category. If you look at this full screen, you can see that many of the lower tercile (blue) departures were at Juneau, while Nome has had a lot of upper tercile (red) departures.


2 comments:

  1. I find it fascinating that Juneau, of all places, got so cold. Granted, -2.5 sd is not nearly as big for them as for Fairbanks - but still. I've come to appreciate using standard deviations for comparisons and not just differences off normals.

    (I would have color coded the cities and made the terciles the different shapes. Colors are much easier to see.)

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  2. Juneau's proximity to the nearby Juneau Icefield and numerous glaciers can create bitter cold when the prevailing winds (mainly NE) support cold flow from that direction.

    Nasty place at times, best avoided in winter or passed through quickly via tourism the rest of the year in my experience.

    Gary

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