The Hockey Schtick blog brought a recent paper to my attention.
The abstract says:
“A recent observation in NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center’s monthly assessment of the state of the climate was that contiguous US average monthly temperatures were in the top third of monthly ranked historical temperatures for thirteen straight months from June 2011 — June 2012. The chance of such a streak occurring randomly was quoted as (1/3)13, or about one in 1.6 million.”
I’m not going to discuss the “chances”. But I am going to simply note the following.
The NOAA ranks months temperature and precipitation based on the number of months from 1895. So 2012 was the 118th year. If a month is ranked 118 (as of 2012) then it was the warmest month from 1895 to 2012.
Using the same 12 month June to June time frame and using data from October 2012 ( before NOAA’s recent update) it took me about 10 minutes to find out a similar streak.
From June 1933 to to June 1934 8 months were ranked 100 and above. 2 of them were ranked 118.
From June 2011 to June 2012 8 months were ranked 100 and above. 1 of them was ranked 118.
| year | Month | Rank |
| 1933 | 6 | 118 |
| 1933 | 7 | 104 |
| 1933 | 9 | 116 |
| 1933 | 12 | 115 |
| 1934 | 1 | 114 |
| 1934 | 4 | 107 |
| 1934 | 5 | 118 |
| 1934 | 6 | 108 |
| year | Month | Rank |
| 2011 | 7 | 114 |
| 2011 | 8 | 117 |
| 2012 | 1 | 115 |
| 2012 | 2 | 104 |
| 2012 | 3 | 118 |
| 2012 | 4 | 116 |
| 2012 | 5 | 117 |
| 2012 | 6 | 107 |
What are the odds of that occurring 80 years apart!
sunshine hours 