Highlights
The surge of early
spring heat records reached over 400 yesterday alone in preliminary reports from the National Climatic Data Center. This includes 68 official National Weather Service locations out of 290 possible records. In other words, over 23% of all official reporting locations in the entire U.S. set new daily records for March 15. This brings the total number of new heat records for the month so far to 1757, which is 18.7 times the number of cold records. Including the number of ties, the total number of record high temperatures for March to date is nearly 2300. For the year to date, the ratio of heat records to cold records is over 14 to 1.
Notes
In a stable climate the ratio of news record highs to new record lows tends toward 1:1. However in recent years the ratio has climbed toward 3:1, with three new records highs recorded for every new record low in 2011, reflecting a warming climate.The source article CapitalClimate was published March 16, 2012 by Preliminary Data Lift March Heat Records to Nearly 19 Times Cold Records .
