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Autumn in the Valley? You’re getting warmer
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Halloween is just around the corner, and the weather is delightful.
For Labor Day.
For the early part of this week, the forecast is calling for highs about 10 degrees above normal.
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The Valley’s falls are getting warmer, according to a new study from the National Weather Service office in Phoenix. Over the past 110 years, the average high temperature here during last two weeks of October has risen 2.1 degrees.
“And, historically, this is the time of year when we’re cooling the fastest,” said the study’s author, meteorologist Paul Iniguez.
Indeed, as Iniguez’s research shows in October, on average, the high temperature drops 13 degrees.
Why Valley autumns are getting warmer is a difficult question to answer. Iniguez believes regional warming over the Southwest is to blame.
Iniguez said he was prompted to do the study after hearing people’s subjective opinions that warm weather was lasting deeper into the fall.
Certainly the evidence was there.
In the week before Halloween, both this year and last, temperatures climbed into the mid-90s, including a candy-melting mark of 97 on Oct. 28, 2007. In fact, since 2003 those seven days have experienced a cool stretch only once (2004).
Iniguez first looked at when the last 90-degree day occurred in Phoenix over the years.
The long-term average is Oct. 21, he found, but decade-by-decade that date tended to vary in no particular pattern.
So Iniguez decided to scrap the benchmark of a specific temperature, and instead look at average highs during Oct. 18-31. That’s when he found a trend upward that was statistically significant.
The autumn of 2008 is also notable for its dryness, Iniguez said. No precipitation is in the forecast through the rest of October and if that holds, Phoenix will have had only its fifth rain-free September-October span in the region’s recorded weather history.
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