Aug. 1, 2006 — It's official: July 2006 was one of the warmest months on record for the lower 48 U.S. states, according to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).
"The persistence of the unusually hot temperatures has made the past month one of the warmest since records began in 1895 for the contiguous U.S.," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch of NOAA's NCDC in Asheville, N.C. "We will not know for another two days if the record warm national record set in July 1936 will be eclipsed."
What he can say, however, is that for many places it’s been the most blistering weather in decades.
"There have been about 50 new all-time records," Lawrimore told Discovery News. Those records are at weather stations throughout the central and western U.S. The stations had anywhere from 30 to more than 70 years of climate data, he said.
The intense and enduring heat wave started on July 15 in the northern Plains and upper Midwest, smashing temperature records standing since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, said Lawrimore, reviewing the way the heat wave progressed.
The high temperatures then spread west across the Great Plains by July 19 and moved to the western U.S. by July 21, before returning to the northern Plains by July 28.
And that was just July, which is almost always the hottest month of the year. The first six months of 2006 were also unusually warm, according to a statement by the NCDC. The average temperature for the continental U.S. made for the warmest first half of any year since record keeping began in 1895.
June was the second warmest on record. Rainfall, averaged over the nation, was below average. That’s a bad combination, since more heat and less rainfall dries out soil, which is one measure of drought.
On the other hand, the Northeast was hit by severe flooding and record rainfall during the last week of June.
So do we blame global warming? Perhaps. Global surface temperature was second warmest on record for June, according to NCDC reports.
Worldwide, 2006 is currently running in fifth or sixth place for hottest, said climate researcher Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
"July numbers will be out in a week or so, and that might show some more drama," said Schmidt, who is also the Webmaster of realclimate.org, the Web's blog central for learning what’s happening in climate science.
That 2006 is even in the running is significant, because 2005 was the warmest on record. Tied with 2005 is 1998 — with 2002, 2003 and 2004 all right behind. In other words, four of the five hottest years were in the last five years, and eight of the 10 hottest were in the last decade.
