An Empirical Investigation of the Period of Time Required to Determine the Normal Daily Maximum Temperature

The weather normal is probably the most generally used and computed statistics in meteorology. Almost every weather report refers to normals and all forecasting may be considered as the prediction of departures from normal. Thus the determination of a good normal is one of the most important objectives of climatology. The remainder of this chapter describes the problem in greater detail, defines three technical terms, gives a brief outline of some of the limitations of this study, and discusses the organization of the remainder of the thesis.