Smoothing

Smoothing is like when you take a bumpy road, and then you roll it out with a giant roller so it's nice and flat. That flat road is like a smoothed out version of the bumpy one. In data, smoothing means calculating an average of different numbers (like amounts of rainfall over the past few weeks) so that it shows a pattern rather than being just a bunch of wiggles. Smoothing makes data easier to understand and predict.