Unusual Warmth Won't Quit in Pittsburgh

It sure has been warm lately in Pennsylvania. The extreme warmth this month, as illustrated on the State College temperature graph below for March 10-25, is making people wonder if this is a trend. The blue line (low temperatures) should be in the blue area, same for red (highs). Note that we barely even touched the green (normal) area during the middle of this month, and many of our highs have tied records.

A friend on the Pennsylvania Storm Chasers group on Facebook pointed out that Pittsburgh had scored more than a year's worth of "above normal" months. I had my stats man, Ralph Fato, pull some data to see how unusual that was. Here's what he found:

"Since Record keeping began for Pittsburgh, PA in 1871, there only have only been 2 times of more than 11 straight months with above normal monthly temps. The last time we had more than 11 months in a row was in 1990-91 where we saw 13 straight months." Since there's nothing that could keep PIT below normal for this month (despite a couple of cold days this week, it's still over +13 and our forecast projects it staying above +11.5), we're going to hit 12 months as of Saturday. So, this isn't unprecedented, but it's only happened three times in history. Here's Ralph's data (I have not vetted it).

If we keep rolling warm through April, we'll tie the 140-year record; if the heat continues in May, we'll break it, but right now, it's not something that hasn't happened before. NOTE: As someone on the Facebook Page commented, it would be most fair to compare to the average of the appropriate 30-year period, since these change, but that data is harder to get hold of.