Hottest summer ever for Columbia

In the hottest summer in Columbia history, not a single daily maximum temperature was broken.

Huh? How does that happen?

We just never cooled off at night.

The low temperatures were higher than normal. The records for highest minimum daily temperature were broken or tied for 10 days this summer at Columbia Metropolitan Airport.

The culprit? Mainly the amount of moisture in the air overnight. Yep, it’s not the heat; it’s the humidity.

Usually, the air cools into the lower 70s at night in July and August. This summer, overnight lows usually were in the upper 70s. Daily records for hottest low temperature were set June 13, 15 and 23; July 20, 25 and 30; and Aug. 13, 15, 20 and 21. All were in the 77 to 79 range.

Columbia did tie the daily high record of 101 on July 25, one of only four days that topped 100.

The daily mean temperature (take the daily high and daily low and divide by two) for Columbia from June 1 through Aug. 29 has been 84.0, well in front of the next warmest year on record, 1986, at 83.1.

The average daily low temperature has been 73.9, also ranking as the hottest on record. But the daily high temperature has been only 94.1, which ranks as the fifth-warmest, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center.

The more complicated question is why the air didn’t cool at night. Mark Malsick at the State Climate Office joked that a doctoral student could write a dissertation on it.

Malsick and Greg Carbone at the USC geography department offered some likely meteorological explanations.

In general, the Bermuda high that so often impacts our summer weather set up this summer and stayed put, steering moist air our way off the Gulf of Mexico.

Moister air and greater nighttime cloud cover keeps warm air from rising at night. In a more typical summer, the warm air rises after dark and is replaced by slightly cooler air at the surface.

On the flip side, the cloud cover tends to keep down the afternoon highs. Thus few record afternoon highs, but lots of humidity.

Even people used to dealing with the summer heat have been talking about how this season has been different.

Distance runners often train at the crack of dawn in the summer to avoid the heat. That did no good this summer.

“Even when I did just a short run, two or three miles, I literally had sweat dripping off my fingertips,” said Jeanna Moffet, who has been running in Columbia for 25 years. “My running friends and I have talked about how when we run we feel so sluggish, like we’re out of shape.

“I went out the other day (in the morning) and it felt like I could drink the air.”

The dog days of summer have been worse than normal, even for the dogs. Jeff Brandenburg takes his Weimaraners running with him in the mornings. This summer, the usually rugged dogs have given out after about 30 minutes, prompting him to take them back home and finish his training runs on his own.

“Most runners in Columbia know you have to run in the morning in the summer to avoid the heat, but even the mornings have been oppressive this summer,” Brandenburg said.

While the heat is just a hindrance to some, it’s dangerous to others.

Emergency room doctors say they have been busier than normal this summer. Numbers related to heat are difficult to quantify because heat can be a factor in many health problems. But heat exhaustion is one of the few conditions heat-specific, and Providence Hospital reported that it treated 86 heat exhaustion patients this summer, compared to 54 last summer.

The moister-than-normal air also is one cause of the powerful afternoon thunderstorms that have bedeviled the state this summer. There also were more stationary fronts than normal that settled over the state. The air pressure difference on frontal edges creates the lift that leads to thunderstorms.

But we’ve had other summers with stationary fronts and a stuck Bermuda high. Why is this summer No. 1 in terms of heat?

The experts say many statistics still need to be crunched to come up with an answer.

They also agree it’s too early — and the Columbia data is too specific to Columbia — to chalk up this summer as further proof of climate change.

For example, Charleston also broke or tied 10 daily records for highest low temperatures this summer (Greenville did it on eight days). The previous daily records broken in Charleston all had been set in the past 30 years, an indication of a multi-decade warming trend.

But the previous daily records broken at Columbia dated back much longer. Two were in the 1920s and the oldest record was from 1912.

And just think, they didn’t have air conditioning in homes back then.