North Olympic Peninsula citizens felt the heat Tuesday, but the National Weather Service said temperatures weren’t officially record-breaking — although Port Angeles had its hottest day in the past nine years and Port Townsend and Sequim came within mere degrees of setting records.
Port Angeles reached 77 degrees, said Dennis D’Amico, weather service meteorologist in Seattle.
Sequim hit 75 degrees, one degree shy of a record. Port Townsend’s temperatures rose to 78 degrees, two degrees below a record, and Forks stayed relatively cool at 71 degrees.
Although Port Angeles’s high temperature was 10 degrees above the highest temperature on record from 2004, D’Amico said that — unlike other cities on the Peninsula — the official records in Port Angeles date back only to 2000.
“We don’t like to say something is record-breaking until we have about 30 years of continuous data, because that is when it would actually carry some weight,” he said, adding that he didn’t know why the record in Port Angeles was so sparse.
Although D’Amico wouldn’t go as far as to say it was a new record, he said that — like all the other areas on the Peninsula — Port Angeles was feeling above-average temperatures Tuesday.
The average temperature in Port Angeles over the past 10 years is 62 degrees.
“So today has been about 15 degrees above average maximum temperature, so that is how we would classify it,” D’Amico said.
Close to record
Sequim’s 75 degrees was just below its record of 76 degrees set in 2007.
The average temperature in Sequim on June 2 is 63 degrees, D’Amico said.
Forks’ 71 degrees on Tuesday is also the average for the day. The record, set in 1978, is 87 degrees, D’Amico said.
Data have been collected at the Quillayute Airport since 1966, he said.
Port Townsend was also close to its highest-ever record of 80 degrees — set in several years but most recently in 1979, D’Amico said.
The average temperature there is 65 degrees, he said.
“It falls into the ballpark, and 13 degrees above the normal is significant,” he said.
The data from Port Townsend date back about 100 years, but the statistics are not all from the same source.
D’Amico said that it was too complicated to ascertain the “official” record.
“Weather data information isn’t always as cut-and-dried as you would like it to be,” he said.
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.
