2016 Summer Review

Meteorological summer ends today, allowing us to review this summer’s temperatures in our Climate Matters markets across the country. Summers are warming across the country as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere with the largest increase in parts of the Southwest.

There’s a diverse array of hot spots this summer from the Great Lakes to the Southeast to the Southwest, and even Alaska. Cleveland, Savannah, Las Vegas, and Anchorage each had their hottest summer on record.

Our graphic this week shows the years in your market that had the hottest and coolest summers on record. We then ranked each year’s average summer temperature relative to those two extremes. 

There are often hot spots and cold spots across the U.S. each season. But this year’s preliminary analysis indicates nearly all of the country was hotter than normal this summer. Only 3 of the 135 markets we analyzed had an average summer temperature below its median value, and 77 of the markets had a summer among the hottest 10% of years in their period of record.

The full NOAA national analysis for August will be released on September 8. Their most recent monthly report indicated that the June-July period was the 5th hottest on record in the U.S. The only four hotter such periods were in 2012, 2006, 1936, and 1934.

On the global scale, June and July were the latest in a string of record-hot months. July marked the 15th month in a row of record heat and was the hottest month in more than a century of recordkeeping. This year is still on track to finish as the hottest year on record. That would make this the third record hot year in a row, coming off the back-to-back records of 2014 and 2015.

Methodology: Data was retrieved from RCC-ACIS.org at 4 p.m. on Aug. 29. Summer average temperature is based on daily temperature average for June 1 - August 28. Rankings are compared to the coolest and hottest summers during each station’s period of record.