Residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul may have been tempted to reset their calendars back a month over the weekend. It felt more like late October than late November as the Twin Cities shot to 56 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday to set a new record high for the date, surpassing the previous record of 55 degrees set way back in 1905.
"There's a very good chance we won't see temperatures like that again for another five months," observed Fox 9 news. The next time the average high climbs to 56 degrees for the Twin Cities is in early April.
It has been an unusually warm fall across southern Minnesota. September ended up nearly four degrees above average, making it their seventh-warmest on record. Minneapolis-St. Paul just had its 10th-warmest October on record, with an average temperature for the month more than five degrees above normal. Combining the two months, it has been the fourth-warmest September through October on record.
So far, November has done little to change this overall warm fall pattern. There have been only two days out of 24 below average this month. The final month of meteorological fall is now running nearly six degrees above average.
This warm fall has been playing out across the state of Minnesota. The state had its seventh-warmest September and eighth-warmest October on record. The first two months of fall were nearly six degrees above average, ranking the September-October period as the third-warmest on record for the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
The central U.S. led the way for the contiguous U.S.'s unusually warm October. From Minnesota southward to Texas, several states in the middle of the country had the largest departures from normal for the month.
"Thirteen states recorded a top-10 warm October, with Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and Texas each averaging at least 5 degrees Fahrenheit above their 20th-century averages," according to the National Centers for Environmental Information's October national climate report.
The Twin Cities weren't alone in setting a record over the weekend. Over 140 record warm temperatures across parts of at least 17 states were either broken or tied between Saturday and Sunday. The hottest highs struck central and southern Texas as temperatures soared into the lower 90s from north of Houston to as far south as Brownsville.
It is now likely the U.S. will have a top-10-warmest year on record. The country just had its eighth-warmest October on record. Through October, this has been the seventh-warmest first 10 months of the year on record for the contiguous U.S.
It has been a warm year for the planet, too. After Earth's third-warmest October on record, the January through October period was the second-warmest such period on record for the world. This year is virtually guaranteed to be among the top-five-warmest years on record, with a 99.9% chance it will rank that high.
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