Weather Statistics

On the fever chart of rising temperatures, 2006 was the warmest year on record for the 48 contiguous states, pairing a lethal summer heat wave with a winter so mild that in some places daffodils bloomed out of season and bears forgot to hibernate, government climate experts reported Tuesday. Based on an analysis of readings from 1,200 weather stations around the country, the average annual temperature in the Lower 48 states last year was 2.

A February heat wave set records Saturday at Los Angeles International Airport and other spots around the Southland, but forecasters said more seasonal conditions would return today. Saturday's high of 89 in downtown L.A. wasn't a record, but it did tie the high for the date set in 1890, said National Weather Service spokesman Bill Hoffer. The Los Angeles-area records included 87 at the airport, 87 at UCLA and 88 in Long Beach, Hoffer said.

Put away that umbrella and hold on to that moisturizer. The National Weather Service on Monday declared that Los Angeles is experiencing its driest year on record. Only about 2.40 inches of rain has fallen on downtown Los Angeles since July 1, and there's no sign of rain through at least the middle of this month. Forecasters expected February -- historically Los Angeles' wettest month -- to provide some relief, but it didn't.

This has been the world's warmest winter since record-keeping began more than a century ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported this week. The combined land and ocean temperature from December through February was 1.3 degrees above the 20th century mean, the agency said. "Contributing factors were the long-term trend toward warmer temperatures as well as a moderate El Nino in the Pacific," said Jay Lawrimore of the agency's National Climatic Data Center.

A slight adjustment to U.S. temperature records has bumped 1998 as the hottest year in the country's history and made the Dust Bowl year of 1934 the new record holder, according to NASA. But the re-ranking did not affect global records, and 1998 remains tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record, climatologist Gavin A. Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York said Tuesday. The data adjustment changes "the inconsequential bragging rights for certain years in the U.S.

People here expect it to be hot, but they sure wouldn't mind a cool spell. You know, maybe 105 or so. Phoenix reached a shoe-melting, spirit-crushing milestone Wednesday: 29 days of temperatures 110 degrees or higher in a single year. The previous record of 28 days was set in 1970 and matched in 2002, according to the National Weather Service. The streak is enough to vaporize any humor left in the phrase "It's a dry heat." The average number of days 110 or higher in a given year is 10.

It wasn't too many months ago, during a dry spell, when civic leaders here warned of a possible drought in 2006. The city's drinking supply could run out, they said. Lawns could turn crispy brown. Residents of this squeaky-clean metropolis might -- banish the thought -- have to cut back on showers. All that worrying has gone down the storm drains, drowned by rainfall that as of Friday had gone on for 26 days in a row.

There's been so much snow in this mountain town that the city ran out of places to put it. The 70,000 cubic yards of it plowed from the streets since November have spilled from the city's giant snow storage lot into a neighboring lot that normally holds construction debris. Condominiums and hotels have had to hire trucks to haul away the snow. Motorists inch through intersections because walls of snow line the streets and block views. Even an unusually early spring melt has caused problems.

If the weather forecasters were right, this paper you're reading should be dry because the recent rains are over -- at least for the next week. Yes, the area got wet again Wednesday -- a quarter of an inch fell in downtown Los Angeles -- snarling traffic, causing more collisions than usual and necessitating at least one swift-water rescue, of a woman marooned on a flooded road in San Bernardino County.

Almost five months after the record-shattering 2005 hurricane season ended, the summer of storms suddenly grew bigger by one. Upon further review of weather records, the National Hurricane Center in Miami added a 28th storm to the season, which officially ended Nov. 30, 2005. The old record of 21 storms was set in 1933. The center added an unnamed tropical storm that briefly popped up in early October and meandered around the Azores, the island chain west of Portugal.