I looked at the extreme departures from 30-year normals of the daily average temperatures in my last blog post in late June, 2021. This was right after Seattle and the Pacific Northwest endured record high temperatures for several days.

Today, on the National Weather Service (NWS) site there is a warning of warm temperatures ahead for the next few days. They don’t expect the temperatures in Seattle to exceed the 100˚F mark as it did in late June. But they expect a couple of the days will reach above 90˚F. Other areas in the West to the south and east of Seattle are expected to have temperatures exceed 100˚F over the next few days.

In my book, anything above about 85˚F is hot. Maybe not uncomfortably hot, but it’s certainly starting to hit the unpleasantly hot range for me. I grew up in the Great Lakes Midwest, so hot summers are nothing new. But my most recent 38 summers have mostly been spent in Seattle, a city with generally cooler and more pleasant summers than those in the Midwest. I enjoy those and have become accustomed to those temperatures. I’ve become a heat wimp.

However, though not common, temperatures at 85˚F or greater are not rare in Seattle summers. Here’s a look at several charts depicting days – over a very limited 21 year time scale – where maximum temperatures match or exceed the following thresholds: 85F, 90F, 95F, 100F, and 105F at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Seattle’s official NWS site of record.

Click on any image below to expand it. Hint: once you expand the first chart, you can navigate to the others using your “left” and “right” arrow keys on your keyboard.