Anomaly (natural sciences)

In the natural sciences, especially in atmospheric and Earth sciences involving applied statistics, an anomaly is a persisting deviation in a physical quantity from its expected value, e.g., the systematic difference between a measurement and a trend or a model prediction.^[1] Similarly, a standardized anomaly equals an anomaly divided by a standard deviation.^[1] A group of anomalies can be analyzed spatially, as a map, or temporally, as a time series. It should not be confused for an isolated outlier. There are examples in atmospheric sciences and in geophysics.