After the blistering temperatures during 2011, and the relatively mild summer of 2012, you’d never guess that Houston has had a warmer overall temperature this year.
But through August, it has, says Charles Roeseler of the National Weather Service.
The city’s average temperature through August is 74.3 degrees, which is 0.4 degrees higher than the same mark in 2011. Galveston is warmer still. It’s average temperature of 75.5 degrees is 1.3 degrees higher than its previous high through August, set in 2000.
In looking at the plot below, we can see that much of this year’s warmth was driven in the spring, when March was the fourth warmest on record, April the sixth warmest, and May the eighth warmest on record.
The year 2011 ended a bit cooler in Houston, and it finished as the second warmest on record, one-tenth of a degree behind the year 1962. In all likelihood, at the end of 2012, this year and last will be among the three warmest years on record in the city of Houston.
This year’s local temperatures are consistent with the anomalously warm start to 2012 for the contiguous United States — all of the states by Alaska and Hawaii.
The National Climatic Data Center plot below shows that this year’s temperature through August is 4 degrees above the long-term average, and 1 degree above the next closest temperature — 1998.
The five warmest temperatures prior to this year occurred in 1998, 2006, 1934, 1999 and 1921.
Is this climate change at work? Local weather cannot be attributed to climate change, to be sure, but these warm trends are definitely consistent with what climate scientists predict.