Despite record cold and Great Lakes ice, NCDC thinks they can get away altering the US temperature record to make the past winter just below average temperature.
74% of the US was below normal temperature this winter, much of it 10 degrees below normal.
It was actually the ninth coldest winter on record, and the coldest in 35 years.
NCDC bumped the winter up to 34th warmest, through an amazing 4 degrees of tampering relative to 1949.
These adjustments are about 5 times larger than what they show in USHCN documents.
[Anthony Watts pointed out that the HPRCC map above uses a different set of stations and different baseline period than the NCDC graph. This is a valid point and affects the 74% of US below normal I mentioned, but seems unlikely to account for more than a about half a degree difference in the regional anomalies.]