With severe convective storms just on Monday, it is a bit odd to consider that we are at or very close to the date of minimum daily average temperature for the year. The featured chart presents the daily climatology for January for Ames with the most recent two iterations of the NCEI 30-year climatology and a simple daily average computed by the IEM over the period of record. Even with over 100 years of data, the simple daily average is rather noisy and a primary reason why the NCEI climatology is smoothed to give a more meaningful daily average value. You may wonder why the NCEI values are almost always higher than the period of record values. The NCEI data represents a recent period of years that is overall warmer than years prior, so their average value will be higher than something that considers cooler years in the past.

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