When in January rainfall was double the expected
average over wide areas, many people made cautious links between such extreme weather and global climate change.
Not exact matches
The cold spells cover large enough
areas to influence significantly also
averages taken
over wider areas like the extratropical NH land
areas.
If we are trying to estimate the
average temperature
over a
wide area like the U.S. or the Globe, it is advisable to use gridding or some more complicated form of spatial interpolation to assure that our results are representative of the underlying temperature field.
But for numerous stations
over a
wide area, your initial
average must be based on numerous assumptions about the
average temp in the first place.