Hotter here & there, but few records, reports Colorado’s state climatologist in assessing Colorado’s July 12-16 heat
It got hot in Colorado during July 12-16, but few records were broken.
True, it reached 100 degrees F in Colorado Springs for only the 12th time in record keeping. And Fort Collins hit 102 degrees, one shy of the all-time record.
So reports Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist, in his blog at the Colorado Climate Center.
Dillon got to 84 degrees, “which is pretty warm for a location that has never recorded a 90-degree day,” Schumacher reported. In the Front Range urban corridor, particularly from Palmer Divide through Pueblo, most locations were more than 8 degrees above average for the four-day streak.
How does this heat wave rank against the records going back in some cases 150 years?
It was a top-10 four-day heat wave in the northern Front Range and Pikes Peak regions. More broadly across Colorado, it was the 14th hottest four-day heat wave since 1951.
“Overall, what we’ve seen in Colorado isn’t that the most-extreme heat waves are getting more extreme, “Schumacher writes.
“Record-smashing events are very rare even in a warming climate, and when air masses are hot enough aloft to have the potential for record-breaking heat, they often have just enough moisture to produce clouds and storms that reduce the surface temperature by a degree or two. Instead, what we’re seeing is a steady increase of heat: heat waves that would have been few and far between in the 20th century are now becoming commonplace.”
The record four-day heat for much of Colorado was in late June 2012. And at some individual long-term stations on Colorado’s eastern plains, heat waves in July 1934 and July 1936 still rank as hottest even now.
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Your graphic covers 3 days. Is that how you define climate? Is weather climate?
The adage I’ve heard is climate is what you expect and weather is what you get. This chart is definitely weather. But the headline reflects what is in the story, particularly the last paragraph in which the state climatologist explains that rather than a lot of new records this fits in with the pattern of generally warming temperatures.