The featured chart presents daily high, low, and average temperature climatologies for Ames during January. The lines represent the two most recent official climatologies from NCEI. These 30 year averages are updated once per decade. The bars presents the simple computed average based on period of record observations. The immediate difference between the two climatology datasets is explained by NCEI attempting to smooth out day to day variability due to individual weather events. Focusing on the NCEI lines, it is interesting to denote the subtle differences between the high and low temperature lines and how that impacts the overall average between the two. Our average high temperature is just starting to creep upwards, while our low temperature still has about a week to go before bottoming out. This difference is another example of thermal inertia as increasing solar inputs help to increase day time temperatures slightly, but more time is needed for the change to be felt with low temperatures.

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