Today marks the 43rd day in a row of high temperatures in Athens GA that were at or above 90 F.  This ties us with the all-time record set in 2011, based on records going back to about 1903 combined from the city and airport data.  Will we break the record tomorrow?  It will be close, with a forecast high of 90 F.

If you get asked this question, there are two places that you can easily generate either monthly counts or strings of days at chosen temperature or precipitation thresholds.  One is cli-MATE, the data access system from the Midwestern Regional Climate Center, which has threshold searches within the Daily access category.  The other is the Southeast Regional Climate Center’s Perspectives tool, which also allows you to check for either total number of days above or below a threshold you choose for temperature or precipitation.  If you use a ThreadEx record, it will combine the city and airport records (if both exist) into one seamless string of data.  You have to be careful using ThreadEx data for other climatological studies because often the characteristics of city and airport stations are quite different and they can’t be directly compared without some work, but for looking at strings of days for media purposes the ThreadEx data work well.

You can read about the cli-MATE system in an earlier blog post of mine at https://site.extension.uga.edu/climate/2014/07/cli-mate-website-provides-easy-access-to-archived-climate-data/.

You can read more about the Perspectives tool at https://site.extension.uga.edu/climate/2015/05/how-to-get-rankings-using-the-southeast-regional-climate-centers-perspectives-tool/.

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