There has been a lot of talk about weather records lately. If you’ve been doing any fact-checking and finding yourself lost in a system of inscrutable pull-down menus and “animation” that doesn’t load, here are some shortcuts.
This is the map you’ve probably seen on blogs and Tumblr recently. It shows the number of daily highest temperature records set in the U.S. in June 2012.
The map was generated by this page on NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center site. (Climate Central has their own version that draws its data from the same place, but offers check-boxes for some other variables.)
What I find more personally useful, if somewhat less dramatic, is searching that same tool by state and picking an individual day. What you get is a few of the state’s major cities plotted on a map, and a list of the record temperatures for those cities. Assuming you live relatively close to a city, this is where you go when you find yourself saying, “Damn, this has gotta be some kind of record!” Here’s Missouri on Monday.
One more that’s fun are the U.S. ASOS Temp Departure & Degree Day Maps. Pick your date range and map and it plays a little time lapse of how those days differed from the 1981-2010 normal. Here’s a frame from the average temperature departure for the beginning of July.
Pick a nice long range and just watch the fronts pass through.









