A number of people have remarked to me here in Athens that this summer has been very nice. Temperatures have not been too hot and we have had some rain, although there have also been dry spells. The thermograph for Athens shows the daily variation in temperature below. Note that yesterday, August 12, was almost exactly normal, with the high temperature of 91 F just one degree above the normal value of 90 F. The low was exactly normal.
If you look at the progression of temperature over the season, you can see that most daily temperatures have been fairly close to normal values (depicted as the green band on the thermograph), with the exception of late June into early July. Since then, we went through one cool spell and since then a July and early August that are close to the daily normals. But if you look carefully, you can see that almost every day has been just a little above normal in both low and high temperatures, which led to a July monthly temperature anomaly for Athens of 1.4 degrees above normal. We only matched the record high on two days in August so far, although there were also some matches (and new records set) in June as well.
If you are interested in creating a thermograph for your own area, you can go to the Midwestern Regional Climate Center’s cli-MATE site. You need to create a free account, then choose your station and go to the Station/Monthly/Thermograph choice on the left menu.
cli-MATE is also a great source of other weather and climate information. Their newest product is a freezing degree day calculator. See their front page when you log in for details.
