Election Day brought the temperature to near-record highs in and around New York City, meteorologists said Tuesday.
The balmy weather could set a record not seen for a presidential election day since 1936, making it a spectacularly sunny day for standing outside on a voting line in the New York area.
As of about 3 p.m. temperatures had reached a high of 72 degrees in Central Park, making Tuesday a tie for second-warmest presidential election day ever, along with 1888, when the mercury also hit 72, National Weather Service meteorologist James Connolly told the Daily News.
“The normal high for Central Park in New York City is 58, and the normal low is 45,” he said of temperatures overall for this time of year. The record for the date of Nov. 5 was set in 1961, when the high hit 78 degrees, he added.
Such numbers are more typical for late September or late May, noted AccuWeather senior meteorologist Dave Dombek.
Dry conditions are also probably boosting temperatures by a few degrees, Dombek told the Daily News. Normally the sun’s energy is divided between evaporating moisture and warming the atmosphere, but the lack of humidity means that all that energy is heating the air.
“The fact that it is so dry is very likely allowing the temperatures to maybe get two, three, four degrees higher than what it would normally be getting to just because the ground is so dry,” Bombek said.
Higher-than-normal temperatures reigned throughout the tristate area, from New Jersey to Connecticut.
“It’s warm everywhere,” Connolly said. “It’s currently 74 degrees in Newark which is 5 degrees off of their record high to date. So it’s well above normal everywhere in the region.”
Washington D.C. was going to be 75 degrees on Election Day, about 13 degrees above average, the Washington Post reported. Elsewhere in the nation, similar conditions were mostly holding sway in battleground states.
Temperatures are forecast to increase as the week wears on, with record highs likely across the region, hitting the upper 70s and possibly the low 80s.
“It’s warm,” Connolly said. “That’s the takeaway.”
With News Wire Services
