Between all the various climate excitement in the news – like record-low Arctic sea ice – temperature measurements continue to be collected. A really great webpage to actually examine the temperature data is at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center. The NCDC data shows that in 2012
North Carolina NC Climate Division 5* Contiguous USA
July 80.5 (+3.2) 81.1 (+2.4) 77.2 (+3.3)
August 75.7 (-0.4) 76.1 (-1.3) 74.6 (+1.7)
September 69.8 (-0.9) 70.3 (-1.6)** 67.0 (+1.4)
*includes Charlotte and Mecklenburg County
**corrected after an NCDC website glitch which originally had values of 74.1 (-1.5)
where the bigger number under each header is the avereage temperature for the particular month in degrees Fahrenheit, while the number in the parentheses is the departure (or anomaly) of the month to the average temperature for that month for the 20th century (1900-1999). North Carolina, like most of the USA, had a really warm July 2012 and the country experienced the warmest July in the 118 years of records. On the other hand, August and September temperatures in North Carolina this year were about a half degree to nearly a full degree less than the 20th century average temperatures. These much cooler-than-average temperatures were even more pronounced in southern North Carolina, which I show above as NC Climate Division 5. This climate division includes Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.
This is a great example of how even when the local temperature for a particular month is below or above average, this may not be true when you examine other parts of the country, or in the case of Charlotte, other parts of the state. This same analogy is true when comparing regional (like USA) to global temperature trends. The summary is that even though NC had a cooler than average Aug-Sep, the USA on the whole still experienced a warmer than average August and September to pile on to the warmest July on record.