A week ago, Gothamist was rhetorically asking if our days of 80-degree weather were behind us until next spring. Now it is looking like we will have at least one more warm spell before fall sets in. That got us to wondering what the latest days were that Central Park reached 80 or 90 degrees. We churned through the daily temperature data from 1971 to the present to plot the graph above. The latest date that it warmed to 90 was September 22nd in 1980. The latest 80-degree day occurred in 1979 on October 22nd. The median latest 90 degree day is August 24th, and the median last 80-degree day is September 23rd. In 1993 the last 90- and 80-degree days were the same day, September 15th.
This year our last day of 80 degree weather may come very close to the median. As the big high pressure system that's been in control of the weather all week slowly slides further out to sea, winds will start coming out of the south. Today's high will be in the mid-70s. We should be up around 80 on Thursday and Friday, and possibly into the mid-80s on Saturday. Sunday, the first day of fall, looks like it will cool back into the mid-70s. There will barely be a cloud in the sky, let alone a chance of rain, through Sunday.
In the tropics, Typhoon Wipha made landfall in China and quickly dissipated to a tropical storm, sparing Shanghai much of its wrath. In the Atlantic, the remnants of Ingrid are still dying their slow death north of the Leeward Islands. There's a non-tropical disturbance making its way westward across Florida today. That disturbance may spin up to a tropical system once it enters the Gulf of Mexico. To the west of Mexico, Tropical Storm Ivo is expected to reach hurricane strength later today and slowly head toward the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula.
