No state in the union was safe from July's blistering heat wave, according to data from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center.
The horrible July heat wave, lasting weeks in some cities, the entire month in others, affected nearly 200 million people in the United States at some point. Preliminary data show that 2,712 high-temperature records were either tied or broken in July, compared with 1,444 last year, according to the NCDC. At least one weather station in all 50 states set or tied a daily high temperature record at some point during July.
Two weather stations tied for the hottest temperature recorded during July. The Blythe station in Riverside County, Calif., and the Gila Bend station in Maricopa County, Ariz., both hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48.9 degrees Celsius) in July.
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Even Alaska recorded unusually sweaty temperatures. The temperature at the Northway weather station in Southeast Fairbanks County hit a record 97 F (36.1 C) on July 11.
Newark, N.J., set an all-time high at 108 F (42.2 C) on July 22, breaking the record of 105 F (40.6 C), set in 2001.
In Washington, D.C., Dulles International Airport saw its hottest July on record this year and recorded its highest July temperature of all time at 105 F (40.6 C), on July 22. That same day, water in the nearby Potomac River was the hottest ever recorded at 96 F (35.4 C) (records go back to only 1988), reported the Capital Weather Gang blog.
The city of Morehead, Minn., had the dubious distinction as the hottest place on Earth for a day, said meteorologist Heidi Cullen of Climate Central, in an interview on National Public Radio. On July 19, the heat index there — a measure of humidity and temperature that indicates how hot the weather feels — was 134 F (56.7 C). (The National Weather Service later said this reading could be an anomaly due to the local weather station's location in a very wet field, and not representative of the entire town.)
