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Sunday, January 10, 2021

Are Record Temperatures Occurring More Often in the Conterminous United States? ... Warmer nights = yes ... Warmer days = no

Source (includes good charts not shown here):


"The  U.S.  has  monitored  weather conditions  somewhat  systematically  since  the  late 1800s  and  the  National  Center  for  Environmental  Information  (NCEI)  archives  these  observations. 

Scientists at NCEI identified a set of stations with long- term observations that are useful for answering questions like that posed above.  


These stations form the United  States  Historical  Climate  Network  or  USHCN.

The  USHCN stations  are  still  archived, though the network does not formally carry the status it originally had.  

These  stations  reported  the  highest  (usually  occurring  in  late  afternoon)  and  lowest  (usually around sunrise) temperature for each day.  
 

 

These values are often referred to as the daily extremes and denoted as TMax and TMin respectively.

A  subset  of  these  stations  having  at  least  105  years  of  data  from  1895  to  2020  were  examined for the question posed.  There were 737 (738 for TMin) stations which met the criteria. 


...The results indicate some clear changes have occurred since 1895. 

... The  1930s  stand  out.  In  fact, of  the  15  years  with  the  most  record  high  TMax values,  14  occurred  before  1955  and  six  in  the  decade  of  the  1930s  alone.   

Record hot days are not occurring more often than before.

The story for the coldest nights is more substantial regarding long term change.

 

Here we see a distinct and highly significant downward trend with fewer and fewer stations recording  record  low  values  of  TMin since 1895.  

 

Of the 15  years  with  the  fewest  record  values, 14  occurred  just  since 1997.   

This  combined  situation  - record  hot  days  are  trending slightly downward (thanks to a hot 1930s) while record cold days are almost disappearing

... “Are  record  temperatures  occurring  more  often?”   


The answer  is  no,  they  are  in  fact  decreasing –  and  by  a  significant  amount ... "

For background information on the data, see: