Climatological normals are widely used baselines for the description and the
characterization of a given meteorological situation. The World Meteorological Organization …

Climate indices help to describe the past, present, and the future climate. They are usually
closer related to possible impacts and are therefore more illustrative to users than simple …

Climatic normals are defined by the World Meteorological Organization (1983) as “period
averages [of a climatic element such as temperature or precipitation] computed for a uniform …

Overview This report describes the methodology used to compute daily, monthly, seasonal,
and annual normals for numerous temperature-related variables at about 7,500 weather …

Weather services base their operational definitions of “present” climate on past
observations, using a 30-year normal period such as 1961–1990 or 1971–2000. In a world …

The authors demonstrate that manual observations of daily maximum and minimum
temperature are strongly biased toward temperatures ending in certain digits. The nature …

Eleven alternatives to the annually updated 30-yr average for specifying climate “normals”
are considered for the purpose of projecting nonstationarity in the mean US temperature …

WMO-recommended 30-yr normals are no longer generally useful for the design, planning,
and decision-making purposes for which they were intended. They not only have little …

NOAA released the new 1981–2010 climate normals in July 2011. These included monthly
and daily normals of minimum and maximum temperature. Monthly normals were computed …

BY ANTHONY ARGUEZ AND RUSSELL S. VOSE period, but one of their primary utilities is
to provide stakeholders and decision makers with a metric of future climate conditions that …