April no rain

April raw anomaly data (orange)

In April 2019, a rainfall total of zero made the raw anomaly for rainfall minus 40 mm. Rainfall, and the other moisture indicators (cloudiness, dew point, and daily temperature range) were much further up the graphs towards drought than they had been in March.
Daily maximum, minimum and subsoil temperatures were high, near the high-side limits of (smoothed) normal temperature.

 Fully smoothed data (red)

Fully smoothed data to October 2018 show rainfall just short of the record negative anomaly set in May 2018, and both maximum and minimum temperatures near record positive anomalies. However, cloudiness, dew point, and daily temperature range continued a movement (down) away from 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.