Last week, Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon announced this was the hottest summer on record for Texas - and the hottest summer ever for any U.S. state, based on preliminary numbers - and last month he declared Texas is in the midst of its worst one-year drought on record. The blend of hot weather and parched land has made for perfect fire conditions, and this has been the worst year for Texas wildfires in over a decade. Nearly 3.6 million acres of the "Lone Star State" have burned so far this year, an area roughly the size of Connecticut.
The heat and drought are record-breaking, but how unusual are they? According to Nielsen-Gammon's own blog, it's in a category unto itself:
"The year 2011 continues the recent trend of being much warmer than the historical precipitation-temperature relationship would indicate, although with no previous points so dry it's hard to say exactly what history would say about a summer such as this one. Except that this summer is way beyond the previous envelope of summer temperature and precipitation," Nielson-Gammon wrote. Read the full report here.
Source: by Alyson Kenward, On Earth.
