The forecast continues to hold out hope for 50s this weekend. How exceptional is this warm of a high temperature in December? The featured chart is called a quantile quantile plot, which compares identical quantiles for two populations. In this case, the daily highs for July and December are compared for Ames. Each dot represents the same quantile for each populations and the red line is a least squares fit for dots. The correlation coefficient is nearly one, which indicates that the two populations have a very similarly shaped distribution. So for comparison, having a high temperature of 55 in December is like having a high temperature of 98 in July.

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Tags:   qq   climate