Record Records: 1,700 Broken During Heat Wave

UPDATE: Additional interesting Southeast records of note added below.

ORIGINAL UPDATE: In looking to see how this recent Heat Wave stacks up against previous ones that I have covered, I look to the NCDC Records Database which tracks when stations tie or exceed a record. Because many records are broken every day across the nation, I made the decision that I would need 100 or more temperature records broken or tied each day to count as part of this heat wave. That took the event from June 3rd through June 10th as you can see from the daily graph. During that 8-day period... 1,739 records were broken (over 300 on June 6th), another 877 tied, for a total of 2,616 records affected.

Above I also show the split between high temperature records and "Hi Lo" records, meaning that the low temperature on that day had never been higher. Notice that these actually beat the high temperature records, and were stronger during the middle of the heat wave, when locations had hot weather on either end of their day.

Simply in terms of numbers, this dwarfs the famous week-long heat wave in August of last year in which over 1,000 records were broken. How long had it had been since this many records had been broken in a week? Well, I don't really have the time or data to research that, but it's probably been a few years. If I've forgotten a recent major heat or cold wave that you think might challenge these numbers, leave me a comment below.

So how hot was it here in State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map]? Well, our high temperatures were not out of control, though we did break records on June 6th (91) and 9th (93).

I used to have hourly weather records for my weather station at home, but I no longer have access to these, so I can't say for sure that we broke any records for "highest temperature at hour X", but it seemed unusually warm here overnight. Normally we can make it down into the 60's, even if the high was above 90. Although it's hard to beat the hot night in April 2004, some of last week's readings might qualify. Here at the AccuWeather station, our warmest 48-hour period looked like this:

Here are some additional Southeast records of note, which you can't find at the NCDC site, submitted by William Schmitz (Climatologist @ the Southeast Regional Climate Center at UNC-CH):

- Chesterfield, SC hit 106 degrees which is the state record so far this year.

- Norfolk, Richmond, and Charlotte each broke at least one daily record that went back 109 years.

- Richmond, VA had the earliest 2 consecutive days of 100 degrees in recorded history (back to 1871!).

- Raleigh, NC had the earliest 100-degree reading ever and their first 4-consecutive-days-over-100 event in June (it only ever happened once before, in August 1983).

- Wilmington, NC hit 101 degrees, the hottest temperature since August 1999.