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This is not consistent with the data presented in the article, which shows that the "percent of Europe's area that is dryer than normal" is historically between 5% and 25%.

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An anomaly in this case is defined as outside one standard deviation[1], so in a perfectly normal year you would expect ~15.9% of soil to be dryer than normal.

[1]: http://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/factsheets/factsheet_s...

In that case, somebody has defined "normal" quite badly.

You are confusing average with median. Normal is colloquially used as average.

You're the one who's defining normal badly. If you are told someone, or even all the people in a country, is/are "taller than normal", would you think they were all above 1.853 meters or whatever, or that they were all outside the range of normal heights? Because that's what anyone else would assume.

The Dutch, as a country, are "taller than normal", and this is a fairly common point to make about them. I've always taken it to mean that their population average is somewhere above 1.852 meters or whatever, not that they are alarmingly, abnormally tall (which they are not).

So I think this example fails, at least. The original article is trying to make the point that Europe's soil is alarmingly, abnormally dry.

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