Your spiking electricity bills and sweat-stained shirts are not lying to you: It was bullshit hot in Sydney this summer.
The Bureau of Meteorology‘s seasonal report revealed that Sydney just endured its hottest summer ever recorded, with average temperatures beating out the previous high-water mark set in 1990-91, and eclipsing all data observed in 157 years of records.
The BoM noted that the temperature for both days and nights in Sydney was a whopping 2.8 degrees above the average mark for the summer period, with the extended heatwave conditions that blasted the city contributing to sweaty days and hot nights.
The high temperatures included Sydney’s hottest month on record, January 2017, and followed on from 2016 being recorded as the city’s hottest year ever.
This summer featured a staggering 11 days where the maximum temperature peaked above 35 degrees, miles above the usual average of just 2. 26 days of the season peaked above 30 degrees, which is around triple the ordinary average for the city.
Western Sydney felt the full brunt of the brutal summer heat, with Richmond experiencing 10 days above 40 degrees, including the hottest day for the season which peaked at 47.0 degrees on February 11th, recorded at the RAAF Base Richmond weather station.
The nights were no better either: 58 nights during the summer months refused to get any cooler than 20 degrees, and no night during the season fell below a minimum of 15. That’s triple the average of 20+ degree nights, and only falls short of the blistering 1990-91 season by a mere 4 nights.
And while the rest of this week is set to bring a decent amount of intermittent rain Sydney’s way, autumn by-and-large is looming as being a dry season as chances of an El Nino event occurring this year increase.
So it’s now Bureau-official, folks. It wasn’t just hot in Sydney this summer. It was *fucking* hot.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: James D. Morgan/Getty.
