Hot take: Long Island's weather goes to extremes

Long Island has recorded more than twice as many records for daily high temperatures as it has for low ones over the past 20 years, reflecting trends found nationwide, an analysis shows. 

Long Island MacArthur Airport saw 247 records tied or broken for daily high temperatures, compared with 100 for daily lows, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center, based at Cornell University.

Twelve of the 20 highest temperatures were recorded from 1999 to 2018. None of the 20 lowest temperatures has been seen in that time frame, according to weather records at MacArthur, which go back to September 1963. 

Certainly Mother Nature is a fan of variety, with some months, seasons and years just naturally coming in warmer or colder than others.

We expect weather “to give us natural swings,” with those hot and cold extremes ordinarily balancing out over time, said Jessica Spaccio, climatologist with the regional center.

“But we are in a warming world, and we see the hot extremes outnumbering the cold,” she said — in the airport’s case by almost 2½ to 1 over the past 20 years. And this means a need for monitoring impacts on the likes of health, agriculture, home heating and cooling, Spaccio said.

This is in keeping with the Associated Press analysis of 424 weather stations in the contiguous United States — ones with temperature records going back to at least 1920.

More hot than cold

“Over the past 20 years, Americans have been twice as likely to sweat through record-breaking heat rather than shiver through record-setting cold,” said the AP, as well as that, “in a stable climate, the numbers should be roughly equal.”

The AP also reported that National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist Gerald Meehl, who has published peer-reviewed papers on the rising hot-to-cold ratio, said people pay more attention to climate when records are broken.

Still, “there are many ways that the current warming of our climate system is/has been quantified,” said Josh Timlin, earth science teacher at North Shore High School in Glen Head.

“Whether it’s melting sea ice, ranking the warmest years on record, or looking at extreme temperature trends, all lines of evidence point to a warming planet,” said Timlin, who studies area weather and climate data, often sharing his findings on Twitter.

In an interview Wednesday, Andrew Wheeler, newly appointed administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told CBS News that climate change is “an important issue” but most of the threats it poses are “50 to 75 years out.”

Climate scientists see the necessity for broad and immediate action to address global warming, with the United Nations saying that “now is the defining moment to do something about it.”

As for Long Island, this area, Timlin said, “is somewhat unique in that our proximity to the Atlantic Ocean moderates the extremes to some extent.”

Still, warming conditions lead to air's greater capacity to hold water vapor, and Timlin points to last August, which, regionwide, “broke all sorts of records for extreme dew points.” At its basic, the dew point is the temperature at which air becomes saturated with water vapor, which then starts condensing — think fog and dew.

“It’s possible that extremely humid summers can become more common in a warmer climate,” he said.

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With that said, let’s not say goodbye quite yet to those multiple-layer-bundle-up days.

“We’ll still have weather,” Spaccio says, so, there’ll be cold days and months and seasons, with potentially “just fewer and fewer.”

With AP