Hot Times For Halloween Season Trick Or Treaters As Heat Records Fall

At least one computer model has the entire nation
warmer than normal on November 3 except California.
Many areas in the South and northwestern Plains
should expect record highs on that date. 

We up here in New England are largely missing out on this, but much of the nation is closing out October with many, many record high temperatures, and that trend of record heat will continue into the opening days of November.

Pretty much everybody except  New England and the Pacific Northwest is sharing in the warmth, though the record highs have mostly been in the southern half of the nation.

On Thursday, Phoenix, Arizona had its latest 100 degree on record.

Numerous record highs were set across the South and East Coast as far north as Islip, New York on Long Island, though as you know northern New England escaped the warmth.

It hit 91 degrees in Garden City, Kansas on Friday, an area that had odd 100 degree weather earlier in October. It got up to 86 degrees Sunday in Atlanta,the hottest there for so late in the season.

The Weather Channel says some cities in the South might set record highs pretty much every day this week.

Several American cities will almost certainly have their hottest Octobers on record. Among them are Dallas, El Paso, Tucson and New Orleans.

We here in northern New England, which has had a foretaste of winter over the past week to 10 days will warm up this week, with temperatures definitely above normal, but I doubt we will have record heat.

If you think we've been talking about record heat all this year and not record lows, you're right.

The Weather Channel notes that through October 27, there had been 4,861 reports of daily record high temperatures across the nation but only 482 reports of daily record lows. Normally, you'd expect a nearly equal number of record highs and lows in any given month.

According to Bob Henson at Weather Underground, the number of days when U.S. cities have hit daily record low temperatures is on trend to be the lowest on record this year.

Through October 25, the number of record low temperature reports this year ws 3,920. That's less than half of the second lowest number of record lows through October 25, which was 9,107 in 2012.

Of course, that doesn't mean that trend can quickly reverse if weather patterns change. You can have as many as 10,000 record lows in a single month, as we did in November, 1991.

There are signs in long term forecasts that the weather pattern will change, and it could turn intensely cold in much of the nation in late November and December, which would lead to a big spurt in record low temperatures.

Stay tuned on that one.