Avoiding drought

October raw anomaly data (orange)

October 2017 was moist: all moisture indicators had dropped sharply down the graphs, retreating from the aridity of August and September. Daily maximum temperature anomaly (x-axis in all graphs) fell towards normal, while that of the subsoil (lower right graph) remained low. Daily minimum temperature anomaly (lower left graph) jumped from extremely low to extremely high.

 Fully smoothed data (red)

The latest fully-smoothed data point is that for April 2017.
At that time, the climate was warm and almost static. There was a pause in a drift towards aridity.

Note:

Fully smoothed data – Gaussian smoothing with half-width 6 months – are plotted in red, partly smoothed data uncoloured, and raw data for the last data point in orange. January data points are marked by squares.
Blue diamonds and the dashed blue rectangle show the extreme values in the fully smoothed data record since September 1999.

Normal values are based on averages for the decade from March 1999.* They appear on these graphs as a turquoise (turquoise) circle at the origin (0,0). A range of anomalies called “normal” is shown by a dashed rectangle in aqua (aqua). For values in degrees, the assigned normal range is +/-0.7°; for cloudiness, +/-7%; for monthly rainfall, +/-14 mm.

 * Normal values for rainfall are based on averages for the 125 years beginning 1883.