Normal Climate Patterns

Part B. Graphs that Describe Climate

1. The climograph on the right depicts average conditions in San Diego, California. Note that San Diego receives most of its rain from November through March with a fairly dry summer. Temperatures don't change much over the year, with summer temperatures around 70°F and winter temperatures near 55°F.
2. Take a look at several climographs by clicking the map or text links at Climographs of Selected Cities.
3. Open and interpret climographs for several locations. Compare a climograph from your own region to those of locations with different climates. Read the monthly precipitation totals on the left axis and the average temperature for each month on the right axis.

Other Climatology Graphs

Climographs provide a good sense of a location's seasonal climate, but they don't tell the whole story... The highest temperature of the day, usually reached during the afternoon, and the lowest temperature, usually reached around sunrise, provide extra information about climate.

Graph #1: Daily Mean Maximum Temperatures and Extremes
The black line shows the average (mean) of all the high temperatures for each date. The red line shows the highest high temperature and the blue line shows the lowest high temperature recorded for each date. The lowest high temperatures represent the hottest part of the coolest day that occurred on each date.

Graph #2: Daily Mean Minimum Temperatures and Extremes
This graph shows the average, highest, and lowest low temperatures for each date. The highest minimum temperatures represent the warmest low temperature of each date. The lowest minimum temps represent the coldest low temperatures for each date.

Graph #3: Daily mean precipitation and snowfall
This graph shows the average amount of precipitation that fell as rain or snow on each date of the year. As the amount of liquid in 1 inch of snow is equivalent to just 0.1 inch of rain, the scale used on the graph reflects this.

1. To access a similar graph for a city near you, go to the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory page for U.S. Station Climatologies.
2. Select a state or territory and a city then click Submit. Check out one graph at a time: read the axes and examine the lines to make sense of the information.
3. Use the website to request climatology graphs for three or four different locations across the U.S. Click the links at the bottom of one of the graph pages to access and interpret additional information about each location's climate.

Optional Extension

This easy-to-follow YouTube video offers instructions for Using Excel to create a Climatogram. You can download average high, low, and median temperatures for your own city and generate a climatogram in Excel.