By Kimberly Cauvel

Like the rest of the United States, northwest Washington is now seeing more record high temperatures than record lows.

While data for Skagit County isn’t readily available, data for neighboring counties to the north and east shows the region is seeing a greater ratio of record highs to record lows compared to the nationwide average.

Nationwide, the current decade has seen at least twice as many record high temperatures than record lows, according to a data analysis by the Associated Press.

In northwest Washington, Whatcom, Okanogan and Chelan counties have seen 2.5 to 6.8 times as many record high temperatures as record lows during the past decade, according to the data obtained by the Associated Press.

That’s a stark difference compared to the data from the 1920s, when the three counties each had a nearly 1-to-1 ratio of record highs to record lows.

That current trend shows weather patterns have become unbalanced — with far more record highs than lows — as average temperatures rise due to climate change, according to the Associated Press analysis.
For the national average, the Associated Press analyzed data from the National Centers for Environmental Information, looking at daily high and low temperature records from 424 weather stations over the past 99 years.

While none of the stations are in Skagit County, the closest included are in the northern part of central Whatcom County and just across the North Cascades in Okanogan and Chelan counties.
The increase in extreme heat locally is most apparent in Whatcom County, which set high temperature records on 41 days between 2010 and 2018, according to the data. In comparison, the county set six record lows during that time.

As for the time of year record temperatures are being set, each of the three northwest Washington counties has seen record highs during all four seasons in the past decade, according to the data.
That also fits with nationwide trends seen in the Associated Press analysis, which found there have been more record highs than record lows for all seasons since 2000.

While not included in the national data collection used in the Associated Press analysis, the weather station relied on for Skagit County trends is in Sedro-Woolley and reports its data to the National Weather Service monthly.

State Climatologist Nick Bond said weather records for that station show, in keeping with the nationwide trend, that daily low temperatures aren’t getting as low now as they were 100 years ago.
“I think it is safe to say that the number of hot days is trending upward, that the bitterly cold temperatures during winter are not as extreme as in the middle of the 20th century, and that nighttime temperatures in summer are on the rise,” he said of local and statewide data.

Increasing nighttime temperatures during the summer months is the clearest signal of climate change’s impact on the weather in Washington, Bond said.

An earlier Associated Press data analysis in June 2018 found that Skagit County is 1.3 degrees warmer on average now than compared with the first half of the 20th century.

But while average temperatures are climbing nationwide, it’s the extremes that have an immediate impact, in some places resulting in increased heat-related hospitalizations, lost crops and canceled construction work, according to the Associated Press report.

And spikes in heat are becoming more common throughout the year in the United States, according to the data.

“We saw this through the country in every region we looked at … We also saw it in every season,” AP science writer Seth Borenstein said during a media webinar. “That fits with what climate scientists have said should happen and is happening.”