Yes, Miami summers are always hot. But this one is already off the charts.
This brutal stretch of extreme heat in South Florida is obliterating records left and right. So far, we’ve broken more than a dozen daily peak temperature records, the ocean is hotter, earlier than it’s ever been, and the combination of heat and humidity — tracked by the heat index — has reached new heights more than 20 times in the last 35 days.
All of that is tracked with data from the National Weather Service’s Miami office and compiled by Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Research.
But breaking an individual day’s record, even a lot of them, isn’t a rare thing in a broiling Miami summer. What is new this year is just how hot it’s gotten, and how long that heat is sticking around.
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The best way to understand exactly how steamy this year is compared to past years could be by tracking the hours spent above a 105-degree Fahrenheit heat index, also known as the “feels like” temperature. That’s the threshold for a heat advisory, when the weather service and government officials send out an official warning to stay safe in the extreme heat.
So far in 2023, Miami has spent 70 hours at or above that threshold. That’s higher than any year going back to 1950. Second place goes to 2020, which had 49 hours in the entire year.
“2023 is already EASILY in first place and it’s not even over yet,” McNoldy said.
And we’re still three weeks away from the peak of the heat season, the day the heat index is supposed to be the highest — August 8.
Many of those hours were clocked in the last two weeks, which saw more consecutive days of high heat than Miami has seen since at least 1950.
“Nothing like it has ever been recorded here,” McNoldy tweeted.
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