Portland Temperatures

A local television weather forecaster showed a chart on their broadcast the other day showing an increase in the number of days in a year that had temperatures greater than 90.

It looked rather scary as, in the last four or five years, the number is heading steeply upward. This came up because Oregon USA is experiencing record breaking temperatures this first week of June.

Some friends said there have been hot decades before so the last five years isn’t significant. Well, this is the Internet, so I pulled Portland’s temperatures since 1940 from the US weather service and did some calculations.

The below graph shows the number of days over a temperature for Portland, Oregon USA from 1941 to present. The observation is that, while the current temperature streak is not that out of line, the overall tread for the last 70 years is upward.

I’ll leave other people to argue about why and what to do about it. The computation is available in spreadsheet calculations and you can get the really raw data from the US weather service.

How is your part of the world trending?