NOAA announced that they have new and expanded tables of normal temperature and precipitation values now available on their web site. Typically, climatologists consider 30 year averages to be “normal” climate conditions, and they are updated every ten years. The current 30-year normal period is 1981-2010. But some groups like utilities want normals over different averaging periods, and NOAA has just released new data tables which provide these specialized data sets in a consistent way.
If you would like to know more about “normals” and look at what the new data sets will provide, you can visit https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/defining-climate-normals-new-ways. Or you can go to https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/normalsPDFaccess/ to access the data directly. If you don’t know what averaging period to use, then the 30-year normals are a good place to start.
