After our episode on the Arizona heatwave, one listener wondered why this year's heat was such a big deal. Hasn't it been this hot before? Her thermometer says so.
The problem is, most home thermometers are not very accurate. Official temperature readings are made by carefully calibrated and properly placed weather stations. It's a big undertaking that's more complicated and time consuming than you'd think!
Dr. Kevin Kloesel, Director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, joined the podcast this week to talk about what it takes to maintain Oklahoma's network of weather stations, the best way to get accurate weather measurements, and why you shouldn't trust that temperature reading in your car.
We want to hear from you!
Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode! You can also email questions or comments to podcasts@lee.net.
About the Across the Sky podcast
The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Welcome back to this week's recording of the Across the Sky podcast, which is put on by Lee Enterprises and the Lee Weather team. Lee Enterprises is a national publication company with over 70 publications nationwide. And our weather team of meteorologist covers it from coast to coast. Each day on the team we have myself Kirsten Lang in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Matt Holiner in the Midwest, Joe Martucci in Atlantic City, and Sean Sublette in Richmond, Virginia.
Welcome back, guys. Hope everyone has had a wonderful week. You know, this is our first podcast where we're actually going to dive into a question or a comment in this case from a listener. And I want to note that this was made after we talked about the Arizona heat and how hot it had been for days on end.
Deirdre wrote in and she had more of a comment kind of question about this, and she said, hello, I'm a bit confused about the hype about the heat. This summer we visited Arizona in July of 2005, and every day was between 115 and 120 degrees. We were traveling in an RV that had no AC in the cab, so I'm well aware of how hot that is.
But locals told us that this is what summer is like in the Arizona desert. And it wasn't just the spike. The high heat continued for well over a month. So why is this year suddenly different? Yeah, so I thought that was a really interesting point. So I wanted to go back and look at the data from July of 2005 and when I did, I saw that her information wasn't very accurate.
I mean, it's always hot in July and Phoenix, I mean that that's what Arizona is known for and especially that time of year. But I went back and looked at the high temperatures. They were generally between 105 and 110. Again, not cool by any stretch, but the hottest temperature all of that month was 116 and it only happened once.
So I think I think the big deal for for this past July was that every single day was above normal for Phoenix. I mean, every day, no break at all. There were several days when it was, quote unquote, only 101, 100 to 103 in Phoenix, which is a couple of degrees below normal. I think that's that's the key here, is that every single day was hotter than normal and above 110, which is without precedent in Phoenix.
I think that really is is what got everybody's attention. And, you know, I to that point, Matt, I know you and I were talking about this also when she says 115 to 120, you know, where she taking that know she said in the cab. I mean and if that's the case, that's another whole thing, right? Yeah. So that's what got us thinking like, well, why did sh