The featured chart displays year to date values of average temperature for each year since 1880 for Des Moines. The red line is the year to date for 2012 and you can see that it is well above any of the previous years since the middle of March. The black line is climatology and the purple line is for the warmest year, 1931. As a thought experiment, the blue line represents this year but with the data for March swapped out for average values. So the blue line is what this year would have been like if we had an 'average' March. You may recall, temperatures in March absolutely destroyed any previous average temperature records for the month.

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Tags:   2012