This weekend I was reading the Watts Up With That article, NOAA shows ‘the pause’ in the U.S. surface temperature record over nearly a decade, and thought that the graph of the data from the U.S. Climate Reference Network sure looked like a decline. Since my anecdotal experience is that the recent winters are colder than 2004 I was curious what the data would say. Is this one of those rare cases where anecdotal weather information has started to match climate data? So I went over to the NOAA  page, downloaded the data, and ran it through R to create graphs of the average, maximum, and minimum temperature anomalies. When we are talking about weather data it is the high and low temperatures of the day that are reported in weather reports. I am still looking for that brave weather forecaster to include the average temperature for the day. For a person who was already inclined to believe that it has gotten colder, it was not surprising that the slope for minimum temperature anomaly showed the greatest decline. All three graphs show a decline and the maximum anomaly showed the least decline.  Since most people are sensitive to maximum temperatures during the summer and minimum temperatures during the winter it explains to me why I think the winters have gotten colder. Without further adieu here are the graphs.