Austria Breaks Heat Record. U.S. July Monthly Heat Records

Austria Breaks Heat Record. U.S. July Monthly Heat Records

Austria broke its national heat record on Saturday (August 3rd) when the temperature peaked at 39.9°C (103.8°F) at Dellach im Drautal in Carinthia State. The previous record was also held by Dellach when it reached 39.7° (103.4°F) on July 27, 1983. The heat wave in Austria will continue this weekend and higher temperatures may be measured Sunday or Monday.



Carinthia is an Austrian state that lies in southern Austria bordering Italy and Slovenia. It is a spectacularly beautiful region as this photo illustrates. Dellach im Drautal is located near the Italian border at 614 m (2,014’) elevation. Photo from Austrian tourism web site.

July monthly heat records for heat set in some U.S. cities

It was the hottest July and calendar month on record for at least 10 cities across the U.S. this past month. Many other sites also broke their records but these 10 are notable for their long POR’s (periods of record). Here is the list:

New Haven, Connecticut: 78.7° (old record 77.4° in July 1876)- unbroken records since 1780

Nantucket, Massachusetts: 72.3° (old record 71.8° in July 1937)-records began in 1886

Providence, Rhode Island: 78.5° (previous record 78.2° in July 1952)-records began in 1880

Hartford, Connecticut: 77.9° (previous record 77.1° in July 1994 and July 2010)-records began in 1885

Medford, Oregon: 78.9°: (old record 77.9° in August 1967)—records began in 1911

Bend, Oregon: 70.2°: (old record 69.4° in July 2003)-records began in 1902

Roseburg, Oregon: 74.6° (ties old record last set in July 1996)-records began in 1877

Salt Lake City, Utah: 84.1° (previous record 84.0° in July 2007)-records began in 1874

Reno, Nevada: 80.2° (previous record 80.0° in July 2005 and also in July 2007)-records began in 1888

Elko, Nevada: 76.8°: (previous record 75.9° in July 1985)-records began in 1888.

Bridgeport, Connecticut also broke its record with a July average of 78.8° besting the 78.4° set in July 1994, but records only go back to 1949 in Bridgeport so it is not quite in the league as the sites listed above. Overall, it was the hottest month on record for the entire state of Connecticut according to the NWS-Boston office, which oversees the weather data for the state. The record warm month in Southern New England was the result of unusually warm nighttime temperatures not exceptionally hot days; there were few extreme maximum temperatures recorded.

New Haven, Connecticut is especially notable since it has an unbroken series of monthly temperature records dating back to 1780, one of the oldest series in the U.S. The Smithsonian Institute published the temperature data for 1780-1872 in their lengthy volume ’World Weather Records: Collected from Official Sources’, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 79, published in 1929 then the Signal Service maintained records from 1872-1894, followed by the U.S. Weather Bureau. The data, however, comes from various different sites around the city.

Also of particular interest was the heat on Nantucket Island where urban development certainly could not have played a role—it also indicates the very warm SST’s (sea surface temperatures) measured around the island during the past month. Likewise, Block Island, Rhode Island came within just 0.1° of breaking their record (July averaged 73.7° versus the all-time record of 73.8° set in July 1952), warm SST’s at play again for this site I assume!



Sea surface temperature map composite for the last week of July. Note the 74° temperature from a buoy off Nantucket (the island just south of Cape Cod). The SST’s were averaging 3-4°C (5°-7°F) above normal for the waters around Southern New England. Map from NOAA.

I’ll update the European heat wave on Monday.

Christopher C. Burt
Weather Historian