Talk:1936 North American heat wave

This main article puts focus on historical high daily temperatures, which in itself is very instructive, but focusing my extensive analysis of NWS "past weather" data back as far as records were kept, the oldest I found was 1869 for both Madison, WI and NYC Central Park, and a score or more in the 1870's at weather.gov>past weather. I instead focused on "Annual Mean Temperatures" believing averages are more important in the context of "Climate Change", and under that filter of NWS Past Weather data the year 1931 was the warmest to date in respect to Annual Mean Temperatures across America. The year 2012 was a close second in some of the approx 200 cities and towns I researched but the warmest on record in Des Moines. Converted to simple line graph form, most of the reporting stations demonstrate an undulating pattern with an apex in the early 1930's and a nadir from mid 1950's to mid-60's followed by a second apex in 2012 with several smaller oscillations in between. There are several notable exceptions to this pattern including NYC Central Park; Washington D.C.; Miami Florida; Los Vegas, NV; College Station, TX; and Los Angeles which all record an undulating trend upward of 3 to 5 degrees (f) warmer. In sharp contrast to Washington DC Baltimore, MD, 35 miles to the north does not. And likewise Albany, NY compared to NYC.

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This page needs some serious editing.. but summer 1936 still stands as the most significant heat wave in North America history in scope and intensity (at least since themometer readings were 1st recorded) on this continent. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 206.248.133.194 (talk • contribs) 12:36, August 31, 2006 (UTC)

This article is titled the "1936 North American heat wave" but only discusses the United States. If the heat wave was really a phenomenon affecting all of North America, then please include information from Canada and Mexico. If the heat wave was confined to the United States, then please change the title. It is extremely frustrating to come across US-centric pages on international subjects. 99.236.81.216 (talk) 19:11, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

You are correct pointing out that we can not assume all of North America experienced the same weather as the United States. But it has been my experience so far, that historical records for other parts of the world are not available except for the small area of Central England. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_England_temperature. Fascinating info that goes back to what some experts call the "Little Ice Age". But otherwise I have not found any source of data that compares in depth of history and as extensive in land mass that compares to the US National Weather Service that begins in some areas back when universally comparable temperature recordings instruments were modernized. (weather.gov>past weather) 104.219.198.107 (talk) 13:42, 16 May 2024 (UTC)