By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

While there’s been a lot of attention given to the recent NOAA and NASA press releases stating that 2010 was tied for the warmest year globally, it didn’t meet that criteria in the USA by a significant margin according the the data directly available to the public from the NOAA National Climatic Data Center. (NCDC)

Here’s the graph of USA mean annual temperature from 1895-2010 produced by NCDC’s interactive climate database and graph generator, which you can operate yourself here.

Note the rank highlighted in yellow. The pulldown menu gives you an idea of what was the warmest year in the USA from this data, arrows added:

Here’s the partial table output (you can use their online selector to output your own table) sorted by rank from NCDC web page. 1998 leads, followed by 2006, and then 1934. 2010 is quite a ways down, ranking 94th out of 116.

Highest temperature rank denotes the hottest year for the period. Lowest temperature rank denotes the coldest year for the period.

Data used to calculate Contiguous United States mean temperatures are from the USHCN version 2 data set.

Of course there is no mention of the USA temperature ranking in the recent press release from NOAA. The only mention of the USA in that PR that comes close is this:

In the contiguous United States, 2010 was the 14th consecutive year with an annual temperature above the long-term average. Since 1895, the temperature across the nation has increased at an average rate of approximately 0.12 F per decade.

There’s no mention of the 2010 ranking for the USA temperature at all, nor any mention of the fact that 2010 was not nearly as warm as 1998, or 1934. I find that more than a little odd for an agency whose mission is to serve the American people with accurate and representative climate data.

They couldn’t find room for a sentence or two to mention the USA historical temperature rank for 2010? Apparently not.

See more here.

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December United States Climate Review by NCDC

The temperature pattern for December 2010 matched what is expected from the negative Arctic Oscillation, especially east of the Rockies.

Florida and Georgia had the coldest December in the 1895-2010 record and the Carolinas ranked 3rd coldest. A total of 11 states from the Ohio Valley to the Gulf Coast had the tenth coldest, or colder, December in 2010.

Enlarged here.

The national temperature, when averaged across the contiguous U.S., was near normal in December, only 0.4 degrees F (0.2 degrees C) below the long-term average. Regionally, temperatures in the Southwest (2nd warmest) and West (10th warmest) climate regions were much above normal. In contrast, much below normal temperatures dominated the Southeast (3rd coldest) and Central (9th coldest) climate regions.

Both Florida and Georgia experienced their coldest December on record. The average statewide temperature in Florida was more than 9 degrees F (5.0 degrees C) below the 20th century average, as every climate division in the state experienced an average December temperature that was record cold.

In addition, several cities including - Miami, West Palm, Ft Lauderdale, Daytona, Orlando, Tampa, and Tallahassee Icecap Note: virtually all cities and stations - had thier coldest December on record.

ICECAP NOTE: For Florida, it was statewide the coldest December on record beating out 1935.

Also note that Tampa NWS office in Rusking reported 2010 in many locations in west and southwest Florida had more days with temperatures failing to reach 60F than any year in history.

Several other states including - North Carolina and South Carolina (3rd coldest), West Virginia (4th), Virginia and Alabama (5th), Tennessee (6th), Kentucky (7th), Mississippi (8th), and Ohio (10th) - had a temperature that was among their ten coldest based on records that date back to 1895.

The average temperature for several states in the West during the month of December was much above-normal. New Mexico had its second warmest December, both Colorado and Arizona had their fourth warmest, while it was Utah’s eighth and Nevada’s tenth warmest such December.

Enlarged here.