What does temperature anomaly mean?

Question

What does temperature anomaly mean and how is this phrase similar to or different from temperature trends?

Answer 1

its how much hotter or colder the temp is from the average temp. it is normally how temp is measured to compare trends.

eg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Globa...

Answer 2

means abnormal.  trends would consist of normal temperatures.  an anomaly would buck the trend so to speak resulting in a temperature much higher or lower than normal.

Answer 3

Anomaly=different from the norm. Meaning, a temp. anomaly will not follow the trends. Yey!

Answer 4

The temperature anomaly is referred to the NCDC (National Climate Data Centre)'s calculation of the mean temperature of land and ocean by collecting the data from thousands of observation sites worldwide. It can be calculated the global anomalies temperature covering the inaccessible areas such as top of mountains, far away sea surfaces, and desert areas. It is occasionally goes  with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for giving the tsunami warning world wide.  

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/rese...

Answer 5

it means it is differant to normal will not usually follow same patterns

Answer 6

Out of the ordinary for it's area

Answer 7

Actually climatologists use anomaly to measure the temperature compared to some baseline which could be a long term average.  They use the term anomaly to try to create the image that this is somehow not normal or natural - there's no grant money in researching a natural phenomonena with no commercial applications.  If the temperature of the earth is 0.7 degrees above an estimated average temperature 100 years ago, we would say that there is a 0.7 degree anomaly.

A trend is the direction that the temperature seems to be moving in (e.g. the temperature of the earth is belived to have warmed about 0.7 degrees over the last century, so the trend is approx 0.07 degrees per decade.