Select Page

SOURCE: Anchorage Daily News

DATE: July 5, 2019

SNIP: The National Weather Service said Friday it took a long look at Thursday’s record afternoon temperatures before announcing late in the day that the thermometer had reached an astonishing 90 degrees at the official recording site at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

The weather service first reported that a record of 89 degrees had been reached in an hourly sampling of airport weather. The actual temperature was 89.1, but it is the weather service’s practice to round to the nearest whole number.

But because the temperature of record is collected at an airport, it is sampled more frequently than on the hour, an NWS official in Anchorage said. Upon evaluation of minute-to-minute temperatures, the weather service said, meteorologists saw that at exactly 5 p.m. the temperature spiked to 89.6 degrees before cooling back down to 87.8 five minutes later.

Anchorage’s new highest temperature on record — after rounding – is now 90 degrees on Independence Day, 2019. The previous record of 85 was set on June 14, 1969.

The average high for July 4 in Anchorage is 65.