Ticker for October 28, 2005

                
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October 28, 2005   October 28, 2005   October 28, 2005   October 28, 2005



Anatomy of a Normal Month

Normalcy is the Climatologist's Great Lie. We try, too often, to
compare our days and months to some abstract standard of standards
that we clumsily call "normal". And at no time and place does "normal"
more scandalously misrepresent reality than during autumn in Oklahoma.

The following two web pages compare this month's high and low
temperatures to "normal":

https://content.mesonet.org/ticker/archive/20051028/oct2005max.html
https://content.mesonet.org/ticker/archive/20051028/oct2005min.html

Reds indicate warmer-than-normal conditions, while blues indicate
cooler-than-normal temps. Near-normal days - what few of them there
are - show up in neutral shades.

In fact, the near-normal days only show up during transition periods,
when conditions careen from warm to cool and vice versa. And that,
for lack of a better term, is normal. That's the way autumns happen
around here. And that's the way springs occur around here, for that
matter. These are seasons of change, and near-normal temperatures are
a rarity which usually only herald a changing of regime.