3.3: Annual Climate
- Page ID
- 51153
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Annual Climate Data Summaries
Finally, in addition to providing almanacs and keeping track of normals and records, The National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) provides annual summaries of a location’s weather and climatological comparison for about 275 locations (since this is a significantly more manual and human-involved process than storing and archiving almanac data, NCEI only does it for a small number of locations in comparison to total available weather stations). To access this Local Climatological Data (LCD), do the following:
- Go to Annual Climate Data Summaries website.
- Under "where," type "San Francisco, CA, USA"
- Under "when," select "2020, 01, 01"
- Finally, select “Download" under "SAN FRANCISCO DOWNTOWN, CA US (2020-01-01T00:00:00 "Annual")… you will then be provided a .pdf file that will contain the Local Climatological Data report for San Francisco in 2020.
Questions based on above procedure
- For San Francisco, the warmest day of the year had a temperature of approximately 100°F during which month?
- April
- July
- September
- October
- Oddly enough, The months with the warmest temperatures were ___________________ in 2020 which is very abnormal compared to other cities which typically experience their warmest months in June and July.
- April and May
- February and March
- August, September and October
This occurs because the months of June-August tend to experience substantial fog due to other climate factors such as Coastal Upwelling (we’ll investigate that in a future investigation)
- In 2020, the wettest day of the year saw about 1.25” of rain in which month?
- January
- March
- May
- December
Scroll to the next page of the document, which provides a complete Meteorological summary for San Francisco in 2020.
- The warmest month of the year (using Mean Daily Maximum) was _________________.
- May
- August
- September
- October
- Scroll to the Precipitation Row on the same page, and look at the YEAR column. The top number is the total precipitation for San Francisco in 2020… this number is ___________________________ than San Francisco’s Normal annual rainfall of 23.65”, indicating that 2020 was a ___________________________ rain year.
- Well above; Particularly Wet
- Well below; Particularly Dry
- About Average; About Average
This investigation provides just a taste of the many data sources we employ in diagnosing current anthropogenic climate change. While we only looked at a few locations and instances, a bit of pursuing would show that much of the United States is on a warming trend (as seen by the increase in national average temperature) while changes in precipitation tend to be more regionally dependent (the west has been getting drier while the north and east are getting a bit wetter). But how do we know that these trends are concerning? The answer to that is to compare current trends to trends observed over thousands of years… while we only have recorded climate data that goes back to the late 19th century, we can use other sources (such as paeloclimate proxies) to look further into the past… we’ll do that in the next investigation.