"Normal" Local Temperatures
Today's Times- Standard looks at recent temperatures, focusing on global temps and records. While I suspect they're trying to tie into the global warming thing, I have gotten the impression the summer temperatures here in Eureka have been above average for at least the last two years, this summer being the third. They do mention local temps:
“We were above normal, but only a tiny bit. And I think for July so far, for Eureka, we’ve been pretty close to normal too,” said Eureka National Weather Service meteorologist Scott Carroll.
Carroll said the average high for June was 0.1 degree below normal and the average low was 1.3 degrees above normal. Overall average temperatures for the month of June were 0.7 degrees above normal, Carroll said.
“We didn’t set any record highs for June here in Eureka,...”.
Only a tiny bit? I've lived up here 42 years. Maybe my memory is faulty but seems to me summers are normally more than a tiny bit cooler than this. I was telling a customer the other day that the average summer temps in years past seemed to be between 55 and 60, with going up to 65 or above being a heat wave. That's not to say it hasn't been warmer on occasion. I'm referring to the norm.
I pointed out to the customer that the last 2 or 3 summers have seemed abnormally warm, with temps in the high 60s to low 70s being common. Is it just me? The customer seemed to agree, but she might have been just being polite. What say you?
posted by Fred Mangels @ 8:34 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I do think that North Coast temperatures have increased in the last several years starting in the 80s. The summer fog has not been as thick and what fog there is tends to burn off quicker. The number of rainy days also seems to be decreasing.
I think that these changes may be the result of the storm track shifting north. In the 50s and 60s the storm center would be the North Coast. Now it seems that the Oregon Coast gets the brunt of the rainstorms.
Meteorologists based their statements on collected data, not memories or subjective opinions about what feels hot.
"The summer fog has not been as thick and what fog there is tends to burn off quicker."
That's one thing that seems to be true. I remember the first time we drove in to Eureka there was patchy coastal fog. Seems we'd get that quite a bit back then. Hardly ever anymore.
I used to say in the past that when I first moved up here in started raining in the fall and didn't seem to stop. I'm wondering now if it just seemed that way because I came from SoCal where it didn't rain all that much?
But, we have had a number of dry periods in the time I've lived up here.
I can't give you a useful answer because I really don't track temperatures. I'm just grateful for our beautiful summers.
I'm not sure I'd normally track temperatures, either, except for generalities. Problem is, when I'm sitting here in the house sweating, or having a hard time sleeping because it's too warm, temperatures can't help but get my attention.
Beautiful summers? Maybe, and I suppose anything's better than that overcast we get sometimes. The kind where it's just high gray clouds and you can't actually differentiate the clouds. They're just gray. I HATE that.
We have been in a 5 year cycle of dry, warm weather. Hard to say if it's natural or "global warming caused by humans" as the weather is way more complicated than we would like to believe.
The dry cycle is the reason we are in a now in a drought and the water tables/rivers/lakes are so low.
I would bet on the fact that wet, cooler years are in our future(well, maybe not with real money)
I also think the weather we have now is very different to the weather I experienced in my childhood (50's, 60's).
One of your commenters has a point in saying the weather bureau tracks temperatures, not recollections. But there are some things to keep in mind:
The weather folks tend to amalgamate the most resent years (certainly they do that with rainfall) to come up with a "normal" so if the temperatures have been trending up for the past 30 years then this era of warm summers won't seem like that much of a big deal. Comparing 1960's temperatures to now, I think they might find a different trend.
Eureka (especially where the weather folks and their instruments hang out) is not very representative of what happens in the county. The rain does not fall as heavily on Woodly Island as it does even in the foot hills and the nearby ocean tends to make all the temperatures even out. If we were looking at Garberville, or even Cutten, I think there might be a different story here.
But as Mark Twain once said on the subject, "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it."
"he weather folks tend to amalgamate the most resent years (certainly they do that with rainfall) to come up with a "normal".
Many years ago either myself or someone else asked TV weatherdude Jim Bernard about averages. I can't remember who, but I know I did ask him another question he answered on air and that was related. He was saying they generally referred to the past 10 years when they referred to averages. I believe that was both rainfall and temperatures.
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