Vermont August Was Among Hottest, So Was Summer Overall

Showers erupt in the hot, steamy air over St. Albans, 
Vermont on August 13.  At Burlington, this August 
proved to be the second hottest on record.

 If you thought August was dreadfully hot in Vermont you thought correctly.  

Actually, the entire summer scored in the top 10 warmest on record, even with a relatively cool July.

The details are now in, so let's do the numbers.  

August, 2021 in Burlington, with a mean temperature of 74.4 degrees, was the second hottest on record. It was just a tenth of a degree "cooler" than the record holder of 2018.

Nights were especially toasty.  The average overnight low was 65.5 degrees. That's a record for August nights.  A whopping 11 nights during August failed to get below 70 degrees.

August nights usually start to cool after mid-month, but no nights after the 17th made it below 60 degrees. As September opened this morning, Burlington did manager to drop into the 50s.

Rainfall was thankfully a bit reversed from the trends we saw during the first half of summer.  In general the north was a bit wetter than the south. For instance, Burlington saw a healthy 4.4 inches of rain, which is more than three quarters of an inch above normal. Montpelier was also a bit on the wet side, with about 4.5 inches.

Southern and eastern Vermont were the most part drier. Springfield only got 2.2 inches of rain, which is more than an inch shy of average.

That doesn't mean there weren't high water problems once again.  A stalled, isolated thunderstorm in central Vermont on August 26 produced flash flooding near Hancock and Granville.

SUMMER IN VERMONT

Meteorological summer for climatologists goes from June 1 through August 31 so now we have that data.

In Burlington, summer of 2021 averaged out at 71.9 degrees, making it the fourth hottest summer on record, behind, 2020 1949 and 2018.

This is really remarkable since July, normally the hottest month of the year, was a relatively cool 69.6 degrees.  That was nearly three degrees cooler than average in the list of "new" normals. However, climate change has warmed us up so much that the 69.6 degree average for July would have been considered exactly normal had it occurred in the 1970s.

This summer featured 14 days that got to 90 degrees or more. That's way above average, but short of the record 26 days in 1949. 

Nineteen nights over the summer stayed at 70 degrees or above.  WPTZ meteorologist Ben Frechette looked into this and found this was a tie with 2018  for the second-most such stuffy nights on record. Only 1901 was worse, with 22 such nights.   

Frechette also cautions there's some missing data from 1901, so we could be off a little here. 

We seem to be on track for one of the hottest years on record in Vermont, unless the autumn and early winter prove to be chilly.  There's no telling whether that will happen or not, but we'll keep track of it!

In the short term, temperatures will bounce around during the first couple of weeks of September within range of normal. It looks like we'll have the usual coolish days interspersed with warmish ones, but nothing extreme for now.