New Decade, New Climate "Normals"

Stateline residents will soon have a new climate "normal" to rely on. Every ten years, the National Climate Data Center publishes a new set of normal highs, lows, precipitation, and other data for more than 10,000 sites across the United States. Each climate normal period is 30 years in length. So for the past decade, we've been relying on data from 1971 to 2000. The new climate normal period will include data from 1981 to 2010 and will be published sometime later this year. Normal temperatures (especially in terms of night time lows) are very likely to rise as the cool 1970s are eliminated from the climate normal period and the warmer 2000s are added.

Using the 1971 to 2000 climate normals, Rockford's average high and low temperature range from 27/10 on January 20th to 84/63 on July 18th. The annual average precipitation is 36.61", and we get 37.2" of snowfall in a "normal" year.