October hot days and nights

October raw anomaly data (orange)

Temperatures

Daily maximum temperature anomaly (all x-axes): one degree above the maximum for smoothed values.
Daily minimum temperature anomaly (lower left): has jumped from very low to very high.
Subsoil temperature anomaly (lower right): back to normal again.

Moistures (moist is at the bottom)

Rainfall anomaly (upper left): extremely low.
Cloudiness anomaly (upper right): normal.
Dew point anomaly (middle left): now not very low.
Daily temperature range anomaly (middle right): has fallen from extremely high to near normal.

 Latest fully smoothed data (red), for April 2019

The latest smoothed anomaly values (April 2019) all show a further retreat from the extreme drought values of the summer of 2018-19.

The situation is little different from two months ago, as I discussed with an enlarged graph of temperature and rainfall anomalies in the post “Hot and dry records in January 2019”.

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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.