Mid-Atlantic Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook: Summer 2022

MARISA Mid-Atlantic Regional Climate Summary map and title

Many sites experienced a high number of days where the daily low temperature remained above 70- or 75-degrees F. A few locations also experienced unusually high maximum daily temperatures in the month of July. For instance, Scranton, Pennsylvania, recorded six consecutive days with a high of at least 90 degrees. In the future, the region is projected to experience significant increases in the number of consecutive days above 90 degrees.

Explore consecutive high heat days and how they are expected to change in the future, in the latest MARISA Seasonal Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook.

Highlights

For this summer, the number of days with a low temperature at or above 70 or 75 degrees Fahrenheit ranked among the top 10 greatest for several sites in the watershed, including Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; and Dulles Airport, Virginia.
The Mid-Atlantic region is projected to experience significant increases in the number of consecutive days above 90 degrees F. For some locations, stretches of high heat days could be five to 12 times longer than in the past.
By the end of the century, the Mid-Atlantic region could see up to 26 consecutive days of temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit per year in a high emissions future, compared to a historical average of three days.

Read the Climate Summary

The MARISA Seasonal Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook is a seasonal series produced by NOAA’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program that details seasonal weather and climate variability and change in the Mid-Atlantic region.

MARISA is led by the non-profit RAND Corporation, in partnership with researchers in Penn State University’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Johns Hopkins University, the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Morgan State University, and Carnegie Mellon University.