March warm

March raw anomaly data (orange)

In March 2019, the raw anomaly for daily maximum temperature was near the upper limit for normal. Daily minimum and subsoil temperatures were high. Rainfall and other moisture measures were near normal.

 Fully smoothed data (red)

Fully smoothed data to September 2018 (except daily minimum temperature anomaly) showed a movement away from drought. More recent data, only partially smoothed, suggest that temperatures and rainfall later 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.