February arid

February raw anomaly data (orange)

By February 2019, temperatures had returned from very high to normal. Rainfall remained very low, and dew point also became very low.

 Fully smoothed data (red)

Fully smoothed data to August 2018 showed that several trends for the spring were typical of drought:

Maximum temperature anomaly was steadily falling from the record high in March.
Minimum temperature anomaly was a little high and steady.
Subsoil temperature anomaly was falling towards normal from a low peak in June.
Rainfall anomaly was near the record low (smoothed) and steady.
Cloudiness anomaly was near zero.
Dew point anomaly was near the record low (smoothed) and steady.
Temperature range anomaly peaked rather high in July, then fell.

More recent data, only partially smoothed, suggest that temperatures and rainfall have since returned towards drought.

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Notes:

January data points are marked by squares.

Smoothing

Smoothing uses Gaussian functions.
For fully smoothed data the function has a Standard Deviation of 2.5 months, it spans 13 monthly data points, and has a half-width of 6 months, which suppresses cycles shorter than 12 months. For partly smoothed data, the span of the function is reduced to 11 months, 9 months and so on.

Fully smoothed data points are plotted in red, partly smoothed data uncoloured, and raw data for the last data point in orange.

Limiting values

Blue diamonds and the dashed blue rectangle show the extreme values in the fully smoothed data record since September 1999.

Normal values

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.