Wednesday August 7th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
July Record Count Scoreboard And Climatological Review
July 2019 got ranked by the National Center for Environmental Information as an above average July, temperature wise, for the lower 48 states coming in as 99th coolest or 27th warmest since records began being kept in 1895.
Here we see rankings for each state in the contiguous United States:
Breaking extreme temperature statistics down, it’s fairly easy to see why that during July the East Coast was above average due to a mid month heat wave. In the wake of the heat wave a strong front and accompanying cool air mass by summer standards set numerous record lows in the Plains. The West had near neutral conditions outside of the Four Corners southwestern states.
Here are the U.S. Record Scoreboards updated through 8/7/2019:
For these data sets all monthly ratios of > 10 to 1 DHMX to DLMN or > 10 to 1 DLMN to DHMX are in bold type. The rankings are for the lower 48 states with the warmest ranking since 1895 of average temperatures being 124 and 1 being the coldest as of 2019. Blue colors represent cold months and red warm. Those months with counts close to a 1 to 1 ratio of highs to lows are colored black. Boldly colored months, such as May 2018, have ratios of more than 10 to 1 daily record highs to lows or lows to highs, and are either historically hot or cold.
July 2019 had a near 8-11 ratio of record DHMX to DLMN individual record counts, so the color I used for this month was blue on the top chart.
July 2019 had a near 13-3 ratio of record DHMN to DLMX individual record counts, so the color I used for this month was red on the bottom chart.
The bottom line here is that there were more warm or hot records than cool set or tied during July 2019, a statistic matching up well with the figure of a ranking of 99 for the month. Due to climate change we will see less blue colors on the Record Scoreboard with time, but at least record daily lows outpaced high maximums last month, so we can notch up another blue month on one of the scoreboards. The heat wave did set many more record high minimums than high maximums in mid July. Yes, nights are getting warmer.
As stated, the ranking for the month was 99, which was colored red. I color rankings + or -10 from the average ranking of 62 black indicating that these are near average temperature wise.
August 2019 has gotten off to being an above average month looking at record counts, but I’m not too certain how hot conditions will get across the U.S. looking at current models. I’m have an update on this tomorrow.
So far, the U.S. has seen a near average 2019 looking at temperature and record counts, but we may be having one of the last “tolerable” years, temperature wise, in the face of global warming. We will see if this chart changes much for 2019 through the end of this year:
Here were the top three climate stories for July 2019.
- The big European heat wave leading to…
- The worst Greenland heat wave and ice melt in modern history all of which was part of…
- The hottest month in recorded history!!! (three exclamation points needed)
Here is more climate and weather news from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
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Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”