Edging towards a climatology

I say edging towards climatology because the process of going from here, a state of not really knowing what the climatology is, to there, a state of having pretty solid knowledge, isn't one I like to take in a single jump.  Even if scientists in professional journals present their work as if we did it in one jump, we seldom do it this way.  Plus, for our purposes here, it's more meaningful to proceed in successive approximations

For data, I'm going to use the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (v2).  I'll also be using the high resolution, in time and space, versions of the data.  This leads to some pretty big files (unpacked, it is about 2 Gb per month, and remember there'll be 360 months for a 30 year climatology).  So you might want to go with the lower resolution for your own initial exploration.

To start with, let's look at the 2 meter air temperature, where I've converted temperatures to Celsius (from Kelvin).  30 C = 86 F, 0 C = 32 F.  The total planetary range is a bit over 70 C from the very coldest areas (Antarctic Plateau -- below -40 C) to the warmest (pretty much the whole tropics).

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