Please send comments about our Global Climate Highlights & Anomalies to:
Paul.Sabol@noaa.gov

The Weekly Global Climate Highlights (WGCH) provides a quick, but not necessarily comprehensive, look at current climate anomalies and episodic events. The product is designed to alert the user to significant situations that warrant further examination or study.

Typically, wet and dry anomalies are characterized by 4-week precipitation totals which fall in the highest or lowest 10% of a gamma distribution, which is bounded by zero. The 4-week period was selected because of the high variability of precipitation totals over space and time.

In contrast, mean temperatures, which are more continuous (or smooth), are calculated for 2-week periods (to eliminate large-scale synoptic features) and then compared against the highest and lowest 10% of a normal distribution.

Episodic events are severe weather conditions (tornadoes, hurricanes, flash floods, blizzards, etc.) that have a significant impact on human activities.

Weekly