Weather odds actually favor the first day of summer being unusually warm in Portland and the rest of the I-5 Corridor.
At least in recent years. Who knew?
I researched this for the my weathercasts last night on KOIN Local 6 News. The chart to the right shows the Portland high temperatures on the first day of summer from 2007 to 2011. The average high is 74 degrees. So three out of five summers started on an unusually warm day.
Summer 2012 Starts Unusually Warm
And today, June 20, 2012, we kept the ‘warm start’ trend alive with a Portland high of 81 degrees for the first day of summer. Summer’s official start time was 4:09pm Pacific Time.
So, that makes it unusually warm four of the last six years. To start, anyway. The calculator on my iPhone says that’s 67% of the time we start summer on a warm note!
Of course my co-anchors Jeff Gianola and Kelley Day were shocked by this statistic and said they remember way more than 5 or 6 years back. And they’re pretty sure this ‘warm start’ thing can’t be true of the decades gone by. I ran out of time to look into that. But maybe next year!
Bruce- you may have something there! I’ve checked the past 12 Summer solstice dates in my area, and only one (2003) was a dud. Three of them had highs in the 80’s (2002,2004,2005). This year’s turned out to be nice as well with a typical summertime daily maximum of 74F.