SPOKANE, Wash. — With Autumn, cooler days, and the smell of Pumpkin Spice right around the corner, I thought now would be a good opportunity to look back at this past Summer which will ultimately go down as the third hottest on record thanks to the blistering and un-ending heat in July.
First of all - this is technically for "meteorological summer" which always goes from July 1st to August 31st and not by the summer solstice and fall equinox dates, as those change from year to year. Meteorological seasons are used strictly for the simplicity of record keeping in the first place. So with that out of the way, on to the record books...
2024 places 3rd on the hottest summers of all-time list. The average temperature for the 92-day stretch was 71.5°. This is only behind 2015 (temp: 72.7°) and 2021 (temp: 73.1°). This also beat last year, with an average summer temp of 71.1° (now 6th). Full top 10 below in my post:
By the way, "average temperature" means the average between the high and low temps each day. If you isolated just high temperatures, the average this Summer was 84.8°.
A number of other notable records were broken during this past Summer. First of all, July was the hottest month on record (any month, not just July) with an average temperature of 78.2° and an average high of 92.6°.
We also broke 5 daily record highs, on July 8, 9, 10, 21; and August 2.
July 21st was the hottest of those days at 107° which was the 4th hottest day in Spokane history.
We had a total of 7 days at 100° or hotter, also a record for a single year in Spokane.
And finally, we broke the record for the most days in a row at 90 degrees and above at 20 days in a row.
