Definition

Is commonly known as the study of our climate, yet the term encompasses many other important definitions. Climatology is also defined as the long-term average of a given variable, often over time periods of 20-30 years. Climatologies are frequently employed in the atmospheric sciences, and may be computed for a variety of time ranges.

A monthly climatology, for example, will produce a mean value for each month and a daily climatology will produce a mean value for each day, over a specified time range. Anomalies, or the deviation from the mean, are created by subtracting climatological values from observed data.

When seasonal variations are present within a set of data, it often helps to express the data in terms of standardized anomalies. Standardized anomalies, also referred to as normalized anomalies,are calculated by dividing anomalies by the climatological standard deviation. They generally provide more information about the magnitude of the anomalies because influences of dispersion have been removed. It is not necessary that a dataset have a particular distribution to express it in terms of standardized anomalies.

Source 

Columbia University

NESDIS Data Management Lexicon and Related Terms

Category

4. Data Stewardship words