Red is hot, and blue is cold. Seemingly everyone knows this. Even though blue light has a higher energy, and thus temperature, than red light. Watts has a recent post about Color and Temperature: Perception is everything. He questions, “Is it just me or does there appear to be a warm bias in the color temperature presentation of the majority of providers shown here?”

I have previously posted a couple thoughts on the use of color when presenting figures to the public; for example Using Color Contours to Improve Public Interpretation of the Temperature Record and Using Color to Visualize Decreases in Sea Ice Extent. Color is not just a way to make a boring figure pretty. The color has to add information. For instance, in his Color is Everything post, Watts shows current (at time of posting) national temperature figures from several sources.
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In a comment on a recent post, it was asked how one goes about getting monthly precipitation values. This post will offer a tutorial on one method of obtaining precipitation data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Note that this will only work for locations in the United States.

The first step is knowing where to find NCDC on the Internet. Then you need to locate a station using the Station Locator - this is a link the left panel on their home page.
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This lovely picture from stevewall shows that rain is not only necessary, but can also be beautiful. When looking at meteorological data, it’s hard to find anything beautiful in the usual definition of the word. But it can be both fun and interesting. In this post, I’ll look at the average monthly precipitation at a few locations in the United States. They are vastly different depending on where you are, and it’s a fun exercise to figure out why the distributions are the way they are.

I’m not a true weather weenie, but I’ll offer some comments on the yearly cycle. Hopefully I won’t say anything that’s terribly wrong. The data is from the USHCN data available on the NOAA website. The thick black line is the mean monthly values, and the light grey area surrounding the line represents the 1 standard deviation errors. I could have used this page, but then I wouldn’t have been able to include the “error bars”.
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With the recent news of the flooding in the central US, some may have noticed that the heat has arrived in the south. But not all, Flooding? Not here. It is extremely hot here as well. It’s 9AM and it’s already 93F. It’s about time I woke my sorry butt up early enough that I only have to walk outside once during the heat.

There’s a piece in the Houston Chronicle that introduces some nomenclature to describe different types of hotness. Unfortunately, they appear to be specific to the Texas area. There is only one that could possibly describe the heat right now: haughty.

Every once in a while, we get a blast of summer air from the west. It’s drier than normal, and also hotter. This lets us brag about how hot it is, and feel proud that we’re from Texas and we can take it.

A chuck of May and almost every day in June can be described as extremely hot and dry. The monsoon rains will soon be upon us, changing our weather outlook to bearish or doggy.