![]() By statistically blending data from the 17 sites, the team created a year-by-year profile of the entire region’s average summertime temperatures from 950 through 2021. Generally for conifers in the Pacific Northwest, the warmer the growing season temperature, the wider the tree ring and the denser the wood formed during that period. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory seeks fundamental knowledge about the origin, evolution, and future of the natural world. The team measured the widths and densities of the portions of tree rings that had formed in summer months. Two of the core samples chronicled temperatures as far back as the year 950, the team found. The core samples were taken from living trees between the early 1990s and 2021. To see how the record-setting summer temperatures stacked up against those in years before meteorologists compiled weather data, Heeter and her colleagues looked at tree ring samples collected from dozens of trees at 17 sites in the Pacific Northwest. The extreme heat caused wildfires to rage and boosted the rates of heat-related deaths in the region, says Karen Heeter, a dendrochronologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. ![]() Starting in late June 2021, daytime temperatures at some spots in the Pacific Northwest reached nearly 50° C (or about 122° Fahrenheit). That global value, 15.2 ☌, is a common benchmark used for comparison.īased on modern meteorological records for the area, the scientists also found that such an extremely high average temperature has only a 1-in-25,000 chance of occurring in any one particular year. The average temperature in the Pacific Northwest from June through August was a whopping 3.6 degrees warmer than the average summer temperature worldwide for the years 1951 through 1980.
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