Arctic Coast Heat Record

I'm traveling this week, but yesterday's significant new heat record at Deadhorse deserves a mention.  Remarkably, the temperature reached 89°F at the airport there, with a southeasterly breeze adding downslope warming to an already extremely warm air mass.  The previous all-time record for the Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay area was 85°F, with data going back to 1999 at Deadhorse itself, and back to late 1968 at Prudhoe Bay.

A margin of 4°F is impressive for breaking an all-time heat record, although the period of record isn't that long, and Prudhoe Bay is a bit cooler in summer than Deadhorse, being slightly closer to the ocean.  The highest temperature recorded in Prudhoe Bay (1969-1999) was only 83°F.  Prudhoe Bay exceeded 80°F only 6 times in those 30 years, then Deadhorse did it once from 1999-2014; but it has happened more often recently: in 2015, 2016, 2017, and last year (also in early August).

Here's a map of high temperatures around the region (the blog software won't let me upload an image at this time):

https://s2s.worldclimateservice.com/wcs/tmax_20240806.jpg

Note that 90°F is indicated for Deadhorse, but that's a product of unit conversion-related rounding errors on the sub-hourly data feed; the actual high was 89°F.  Note too that the top-quality Deadhorse CRN site reached 87°F, which is also 4°F higher than anything measured in the previous 10 years of data at that site.