Today is the anniversary what is known as Hot Saturday in New England. On August 2, 1975 and the days surrounding that date, New England was gripped by an extremely intense heat wave. Temperatures across the region soared well past the century mark and set all time records for many stations that still stand to this day.

Here are some of the highs set on that day at some stations around New England(thanks to my dad, Ken Clark, for pulling up this data using the AccuWeather climate database that I unfortunately do not have access too). All of these are at least daily record highs for August 2. An asterisk denotes an all time record high:

Boston, MA: 102 (tied for 2nd all time) Portland, ME: 103* Providence, RI: 104* Bangor, ME:102 (3rd all time) Burlington, VT: 99(tied for 3rd all time) Pease Air Force Base (Portsmouth), NH: 102* Concord, NH: 101 (tied for 2nd all time)

It should also be noted that Providence is the only station out of the ones I listed that has August 2, 1975 as the only occurrence of that all time record high temperature. Portland saw a temperature of 103 on one other occasion, July 4, 1911. Pease Air Force Base saw 102 on two other occasions, July 22, 1926 and August 10, 1949. It seems that early July 1911 was also very hot in New England; both Boston and Concord hit their all time record highs during that time period.

Mount Washington is another stations whose all time record high occurred on August 2, 1975. A temperature of 72.2 degrees was recorded on that day. There is one other day that a temperature of 72 degrees was recorded (72.1 degrees to be exact) and that was June 26, 2003. I am sure that many people are surprised to find out that we have never recorded a temperature exceeding 72.2 degrees in the 76 years we have been taking observations here on the summit. However, remember that our average annual temperature is a very chilly 27 degrees.

Today is also interesting for the mountain because it is the only day that we have recorded what is called a cooling degree day. A cooling degree day is a way to measure how much energy it will take to cool a home or business. Conversely, a heating degree day is used to measure how much energy it will take for heating purposes. To determine cooling or heating degree days, one must first find the average temperature for the day. Using August 2, 1975 on Mount Washington as an example, the maximum for that day was 72 degrees as we already discussed, while the minimum was 60. Averaging the max and min gives an average temperature for the day of 66 degrees.

Now, heating and cooling degree days are based off of an average daily temperature of 65 degrees. For this example, an average temperature of 66 degrees means there was 1 cooling degree day. If the average temperature for the day had been 40 degrees, then that would mean there was 25 heating degree days.

To be honest, heating and cooling degree days means nothing to your average person these days. In fact, it is likely that this value will be phased out of weather records in the relatively near future. However, I still find it interesting that there has only been 1 cooling degree day in our record of temperature on Mount Washington.

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