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A yin-yang pattern of temperatures across the U.S. added up to the fourth-hottest month on record. Click to visit NOAA's climate at a glance page.
South-central heat outweighs record coolness in Pacific Northwest
By Summit Voice
SUMMIT COUNTY — The U.S. was feeling the heat in July, as the average temperature across the country soared 2.7 degrees above the long-term average. The 77-degree reading was the fourth-warmest July on record and also the fourth-warmest month ever for the U.S.
The near-record reading resulted from extremely high temperatures in the south-central part of the country, where Texas and Oklahoma both reported their warmest-ever months. Across Oklahoma, the temperature averaged a blistering 88.9 degrees, with Texas just a few degrees lower, at 87.1 degrees. The Oklahoma reading surpassed the old record by 0.8 degrees, set in July 1954, according to the July summary from the National Climatic Data Center.
By contrast, a big part of the country west of the Rocky Mountains reported near- or even below-normal temperatures, especially in coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest. In fact, a persistent trough-ridge pattern with low pressure in the Northwest resulted in Washington reporting the coolest ever three-month May-July period on record. The larger Northwest climate region reported its third-coolest May-July period on record, while the western climate region reported the 10th-coolest.
The year-to-date has been the driest on record for Texas and New Mexico, with above-normal precipitation for the northern tier of states.
Dallas heated up to 100 degrees or more on all but one day during July, and in Oklahoma City, July was the warmest single calendar month on record, averaging 89.2 degrees for the month. That topped the previous record of 88.7 degrees, set in the hot 1930s, specifically July 1936.
All of Oklahoma is classified as experiencing moderate or severe drought, while three-quarters of Texas is under severe drought conditions, leading to the biggest national drought footprint in the 12-year history of the U.S. drought monitor. In some parts of Texas and Oklahoma, drought is so severe it would require 20 inches of rain in a single month to catch up.
Across the country, 78 locations broke all-time high readings for the month, with another 218 stations reporting all-time daily warm low-temperature records.
NOAA National Climatic Data Center, State of the Climate: National Overview for July 2011, published online August 2011, retrieved on August 9, 2011 from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2011/7.
Filed under: climate and weather, Colorado, Environment, global warming Tagged: | climate, July 2011 temperatures, July 4th-hottest ever, National Climatic Data Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, record high temperatures U.S., State of the Climate, Summit County News, Texas drought, Texas heat wave, U.S. temperature records
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Powder's falling at Monarch!! Have you reserved your spot yet?
Innovative energy underwrites coverage of energy stories.
and there have been 20,000 record LOW maximum and 6000 record LOW’s in the past year according to the National Climatic Data Center.
Tell my dad in the hospital in Texas because of heat stroke about those thousands of low temps
Deniers are getting ever more shrill and desperate these days.
To get an overall picture of ‘highs v lows’ take a look at this graph.
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2.jpg
This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.
Obviously, as the averge global temperature continues to rise (despite lies to the contrary from desperate deniers) the proportion of record highs to record lows will increase – as they have been doing for decades.