The year 2006 was America's warmest on record, according to a year-end computer calculation by federal climate scientists that was obtained Friday by USA TODAY. But the same climate scientists say a second crunching of the temperature numbers with newer software will show it was not the warmest.
Jay Lawrimore, the National Climatic Data Center meteorologist in charge of the year-end tabulation, says both results will be released Tuesday.
"Our point is going to be that it was very warm," Lawrimore says. "It was right up there with 1998," the warmest year on record in the USA with a national average temperature of 54.94°F.
He says the first calculation, which employed a "data set" used to rank annual temperatures for previous decades, is "only partially accurate." The second run-through with the new computer program "we think is superior to this one. It wouldn't be accurate to go out and say this is the warmest year on record. Not necessarily."
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http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2007-01-05-warm_x.htm
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