Singular or Plural?

Here’s the passage. I’ll put the words I’m writing about in bold.

The results show that during 2014 to 2018, about half the amount of warm water travelling northwards towards the Arctic Ocean actually flows though the Rockall Trough.

Historical data from the region suggest that this is not always the case, with more water flowing through the Iceland Basin to the west in other years. 

NationalOceanographyCentre@public.govdelivery.com newsletter for September 25, 2020, referring to https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JC016403

(“Travelling” has two l’s because the National Oceanography Centre is in England.)

So should “data” be singular or plural? Technically, the word is a plural (the singular is “datum”). You mainly see the word used as a plural in scientific writing, I suppose because they like to be technically correct and they use Latin a lot. But “data” refers to a group of um, datums, and “group” is singular. So in informal writing, you can get away with using “data” as a singular.

But use “data” as a plural if you want to be really really correct.

Here’s a picture of the data-collecting instrument:

PS—I could have said “data points” or “results” instead of “datums.” “Datums” is funnier.