Saturday, August 12, 2023

Here We Go Again

The normal high/low for this Monday is 84° | 55°.

I've been keeping track of daily Salem Oregon weather since I moved here on 9/1/2011. The temperature deviances are actually a pretty good Gaussian distribution. So I can estimate occurrences of high temperatures.

A high of 108°F (24°F above normal) is 3.99 standard deviations over the mean, which should occur 84 years.

Our high of 117°F on 6/28/21, the monster Pacific Northwest Heat Wave of 2021, was 39°F above normal, which should happen every 165 million years. (!)

I only have 10.9 years of data, so these numbers probably aren't very good. Just for fun.

Here's the distribution in Salem for the last 11 years, for the daily temperature, which is the average of the high and low.

The peak is a little wonky. Don't ask me why. Horizontal axis is degrees Fahrenheit above or below the daily average; vertical axis is the rate of occurrence.

I calculated the mean anomaly and standard deviation of the daily highs to be 1.29°F and 5.69°F respectively. 

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