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# 2018 Year in Review: Taking Bloomington’s temperature
- URL: https://bsquarebulletin.com/2018-year-in-review-taking-bloomingtons-temperature/
- Published: 2019-01-06T14:18:31.000Z
- Updated: 2025-02-25T12:44:07.000Z
- Author: Dave Askins
- Tags: Old B Square, #imported-whole

The second half of December in Bloomington, Indiana, might have felt a little warmer than normal. How can that sort of gut feeling be checked against reality? What does “normal” even mean?

One place to start is the Applied Climate Information System ([ACIS](http://www.rcc-acis.org/)), which was developed and is maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Regional Climate Centers. The [ACIS data interface](http://xmacis.rcc-acis.org/) makes it easy to retrieve information in some weather categories back to the 1800s.

To get a rough idea of how the past year’s temperatures stacked up against previous years, we grabbed a century’s worth of daily numbers from ACIS and plotted them all on the same charts.

The colored snarl of lines in the charts give a sense of the “normal” range of daily high (red) and low (blue) temperatures through the past century. The black lines in the plots show the numbers from 2018:

![r-out-bloomington-temps max](https://i0.wp.com/bsquarebulletin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/r-out-bloomington-temps-max.jpg?resize=1100%2C440&ssl=1)

![r-out-bloomington-temps](https://i0.wp.com/bsquarebulletin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/r-out-bloomington-temps.jpg?resize=1100%2C440&ssl=1)

Eyeballing those plots, the second half of December last year does look like it was a bit warmer than normal.