Ticker for July 10, 2009

                
MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ...
July 10, 2009      July 10, 2009      July 10, 2009      July 10, 2009

(5:30 p.m. update)

The max heating is close to over for the day, looks like we ended up with 73
Oklahoma Mesonet stations at 100 or above. The highest temperature for the day
was 115 degrees, recorded by the Freedom Mesonet site at 2:32 p.m. (we looked
at the 1-minute data to be sure).

Other high temperatures for the day:

Buffalo          114
Alva             113
Medford          113
Lahoma           112
Kingfisher       112
Cherokee         111
Woodward         111
Seiling          111
Breckinridge     110


The Oklahoma Mesonet also has a facebook page! Visit us on facebook at:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=80762543949&ref=ts



(2:45 p.m. update)

Freedom hit 115 degrees at 2:35 p.m., breaking their all-time record high
temperature of 114 degrees. Data for Freedom goes back to 1948.

107 degrees at 11 a.m. in Freedom! (pre-release update)

Remember back when you were buckin' bales (city folks, that means picking up hay
bales, throwing them on a truck, rinse, repeat)during the summer and you'd have
to get up at 5 a.m. to get started because it got too hot to work into the heat
of the day? Some (me!) thought hay bales loaded down with dew were worse, but
that's another story.

With what's going on in northwestern Oklahoma this morning, I'm not sure when
you'd start, seeing how it was already over 90 degrees at 6 a.m. in Buffalo.
As I write this at 10:36 a.m., it's 105 degrees in Freedom (10:25 a.m. reading)
with a slew of hundreds in the surrounding area. The meteogram for Buffalo shows
if not for a brief period of calm around 6 a.m., their low was close to
bottoming out near 90 degrees:



And of course this is after Buffalo hit 115 degrees yesterday, the highest
temperature measured in Oklahoma since it hit 116 degrees on July 6, 1996, at
several stations in north central Oklahoma.

That 115-degree mark at the Buffalo Mesonet site tied the all-time record high
for Buffalo also recorded on August 13, 1996, and July 29, 1986, by the Buffalo
volunteer cooperative observer. In terms of the Mesonet, it tied the 10th
highest temperature ever recorded by the network since it became operational
in 1994:

TIPT:	6/27/1994	120
ALTU:	6/27/1994	119
GRAN:	6/27/1994	117
HOLL:	6/27/1994	117
MANG:	6/27/1994	116
HOBA:	6/27/1994	116
MEDF:	7/6/1996	116
WYNO:	7/6/1996	116
PAWN:	7/6/1996	116
BLAC:	7/6/1996	115
REDR:	7/6/1996	115
FORA:	7/6/1996	115
FREE:	7/5/1996	115

Furthermore(!), it was a scant 5 degrees away from tying the all-time record
high for the state of Oklahoma, 120 degrees, which has been reached six times
in our past:

Tipton, 6/27/1994 (Mesonet)
Tishomingo, 7/26/1943 (COOP)
Poteau, 8/10/1936 (COOP)
Altus, 7/19/1936 and 8/12/1936 (COOP)
Alva, 7/18/1936

As an aside, I shudder to think of 120 degree temperatures in eastern Oklahoma,
imagine the heat index!

At any rate, it will be interesting to see if we make a run at 120 degrees
somewhere in the state. WSW winds gusting to over 40 mph are helping with
the compressional heating aspect, so anything is possible.

I will be giving updates on the Ticker's Twitter page

http://twitter.com/ocsticker

We're only allowed one Ticker per day due to our date format (I think it's
jealousy myself), but if anything major occurs I'll update the Ticker with
the more recent data at the top. So don't be alarmed if you get more than one
today. Or go ahead and be alarmed...it's too hot for anybody to do anything
about it!

Gary McManus
Associate State Climatologist
Oklahoma Climatological Survey