Sunday, November 09, 2008

Ensembles

Wayyyyyy back when, I talked about ensemble computer models (click here to jog your memory). They've been doing a pretty good job handling our temperature trends recently... which isn't good news if you're looking for warm weather.

This is the temperature anomaly (essentially, a measure of how much warmer or colder than average) for Tuesday, November 18. We're firmly in the "-8" region. I don't need to go in-depth to tell you that a map with lots of blue and a negative number translates to "pretty cold." This has been showing up for at least the past couple of days, so I have increasing confidence that we'll be experiencing yet another arctic surge in about 10 days. I wouldn't be surprised to see highs having trouble climbing even into the 30s.

I guess I better go dig out my hat, gloves, and winter coat...

6 comments:

WI Weather Buff said...

I take it that is -8 C below average...

Dang, I knew I should have paid more attention in school when they were talking about those celsius/ farenheit (sp?) conversions! And spelling class.

Is that saying that our high may only be about 26 degrees (F)?

Bleh.

Justin said...

I think to convert to Farenheit you multiply the celcius temperature by 9/5... there might be something else you're supposed to do, but I dont remember very well.

Justin said...

It was bugging me so I googled it. Also add 32 to the temperature

Gus Polly said...

I think in this case -8 means 8 Fahrenheit below normal.

Justin Gehrts said...

I might be incorrect, but I think the values represent standard deviations... i.e. -8 would be eight standard deviations below the norm. I'll check on that...

Justin Gehrts said...

Okay, from what I can tell, it's departure from normal in Celsius.

However, the conventional Celsius-to-Fahrenheit won't be super helpful in this situation. An easy thing to remember is that a 10-degree Celsius change is an 18-degree Fahrenheit change.

So, if my assumption in the previous paragraph is correct... if our anomaly is -5, that would mean 9 Fahrenheit degrees below normal. There are other factors that would raise or lower that, though.

Granted, this is something that's a ways out there... we just have to get through this week's complicated forecast!