When Was The Hottest Summer? A State Climatologist Struggles for an Answer
Open Access
- 1 May 2002
- journal article
- Published by American Meteorological Society in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
- Vol. 83 (5) , 723-734
- https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(2002)083<0723:wwths>2.3.co;2
Abstract
To answer this very common though surprisingly difficult question, a technique was developed to reconstruct a local temperature time series of summer average maximum temperatures in northcentral Alabama since 1893. The results show that the warmest summer was 1925 at 34.9° ±0.4°C but that 5 other years are statistically so close they could not be eliminated as contenders. (The trend is -0.13°C decade-1.) Our insistence that this ambiguity be recognizedby the inquirer, usually the media, causes confusion and reduces their interest level because they desire anabsolute answer to, in their view, a very simple question.Keywords
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