IEM Daily Feature
Wednesday, 18 April 2007

What is normal for today?

Posted: 18 Apr 2007 06:52 AM


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Temperature observations for 18 April for all climate sites in Iowa
Typically we are presented with the "average" temperature for a day which is just a straight arithmetic mean. For April 18th, the mean high temperature is somewhere in the low 60s. The featured chart shows the distribution of high temperatures reported for this day in Iowa. The dashed line is a histogram and the solid line is a cumulative distribution function. You can see that dashed curve is rather flat between temperatures of 55 and 75, which would indicate that temperatures are often in this range. If you want to look more into this, check out this paper, this paper, and the plotting app for this chart.

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