Over 1,000 Heat Records Broken in Northeast

UPDATE Saturday 4/10/10: Total heat records now stand at 1,005 highs and 556 high minimums in the Midwest & Northeast.

UPDATE Thursday 4/8/10: With yesterday's records added in, the totals are 857 Record Highs Broken with 401 Record High Minimums, for a total of 1,258 records broken. What caused this? Basically a blocking pattern setup and kept warm air moving in our direction for about a week. Today's front will "unclog" the system.

I blogged Monday about the record heat wave sweeping the Northeast quadrant of the country. Today I can update those stats... we now have (up to yesterday) 671 record highs broken this month (plus another 293 record high minimums, for a total near 1,000).

The temperatures are really extreme, in many cases exceeding what you'd normally see at the peak of the summer. Grandfather Mountain, NC hit 80 yesterday (update, they hit it again today) - their warmest ever in April and only 3 degrees away from their all-time record high (for any month)! High temperatures yesterday and today are in the 90s as far north as Pennsylvania and New York City; at Central Park they broke their daily record set in 1929. Below is a temperature map from this time yesterday afternoon; today the mid-Atlantic are far above those anywhere else in the U.S..

Mid 90s have been seen by official stations; 95 was recorded at Leesburg and Louisa in Virginia, and it rose to 94 at Hagerstown, Maryland this afternoon - just over the Pennsylvania border! As they say about the Desert Southwest, "it's a dry heat" though - relative humidities are as low as 9% at Petersburg, Virginia.

Personally, I'm not feeling so good after yesterday's heat here in State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map] - I really can't handle being outside in the upper 80s (which makes me wonder how I survived in Raleigh, NC for two years). Just makes me tired, kills my exercise routine and I crash on the couch with a cold soda and some ice cream. You can see on the J-CAM today I have most of my monitors turned to conserve cool air, because my window faces the sun. I rarely have to deal with heat like this here in Central PA - here are some stats on how unusual this weather is for us:

- Only one day (out of more than 41,000) has ever been warmer than this, this early. We hit 86 F at Penn State yesterday, April 6th; only March 31, 1989 saw a warmer temperature (87) before April 15th!- We don't normally get this warm any time of year. The 86-degree reading is 5 degrees above our normal high during the peak of the Summer in July/August.- Last night was much warmer than a normal Summer night.Joe Bastardi's weather station south of town (which I installed and am confident that is sited correctly) did not fall below 74 degrees last night -- 12 degrees above the normal overnight low at Summer's peak, making for a +34 temperature departure for the 24-hour period (graph below).