Monday 85° / 65° Tuesday 73° / 50° Wednesday 74° / 45° Thursday 72° / 42° Friday 75° / 51° Saturday 81° / 52° Sunday 84° / 58° Ethan Erickson | Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS -- For those who enjoy the fall season and its cooler weather, it's been a longer wait in recent years, and the past few weeks have provided another example of that.
High temperatures in St. Louis reached 88 degrees or higher on four of this past week's five workdays, compared to an average high in the mid-70s.
On Tuesday, it topped out at 90, which, assuming it's the last 90-degree day of the year, is two weeks later than average.
This is nothing new in recent years and even recent decades. A recent analysis by Climate Central shows that extended summer heat is part of a continuing trend here and across the country.
On average, summer temperatures continue 11 days longer now than they did in the early 1970s, the analysis finds. St. Louis is about average among the 227 American cities included in the data.
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Those same effects are happening globally, Columbia University professor Mukund Rao said.
"This is pretty consistent with trends across the globe," Rao, who specializes in climate science, wrote in an email. "We are seeing more warm weather events in terms of both frequency and its intensity.
"Generally, the big picture is that winters are warming (i.e. shorter), summers are warmer and longer, and the transition seasons are more compressed."
While we haven't set any record high temperatures in St. Louis in the past month, there have been 11 days over a 24-day span ending Sunday in which high temperatures were within 6 degrees of the record.
By the middle of the week, temperatures are expected to drop close to average highs for this time of year.
The respite may be short-lived.
All of the National Weather Service's long-range forecasts predict above-average temperatures over the coming weeks and months.
The heat is even more pronounced farther north. In Minneapolis, a 91-degree high temperature Saturday broke a 103-year-old record and was 26 degrees above average.
In St. Louis, the warm, dry weather has also increased fire danger. Much of the area is in a severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
"Droughts, continued risk of (unexpected) heat stress, longer wildfire season, impact of heat on specialty crops (e.g. fruit harvests) are all concerns" with the longer summers, Rao wrote.
Part of the reason for the heat in the Midwest is due to something happening thousands of miles away. An uncommonly warm north Pacific Ocean, the fourth-largest heatwave in the area since tracking began in 1982, is impacting our weather.
The warm water spans an area the size of the United States and has caused the jet stream to move farther north, bringing more heat here and limiting precipitation.
The one positive of the recent heat: The lower humidity levels make the heat much more tolerable than in the heart of summer, when soupy air creates high heat indices.
The extended heat has also pushed back the first freeze. Last year, it didn't happen until Nov. 26, nearly a month later than the Oct. 31 average. Climate Central data indicates the average first freeze in St. Louis is 11 days later than it was in 1970.
As for what's causing this extended heat in recent years and decades, it's clear to Rao.
"Human emissions of carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases are responsible for a large fraction of the increases in extreme events and warming," Rao wrote. "While some of these events might have happened due to natural climate variability, what we are doing is making them more extreme."
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