ALBANY, N.Y. — New numbers confirm what the sweaty brows of Northeasterners have been saying for months: The summer of 2010 was a record-breaking scorcher.
Preliminary figures provided by the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University on Friday show 28 cities from Washington, D.C., to Caribou, Maine, set record highs for average temperature from March through August.
A large swath of the country sweltered in early August, when scorching temperatures and high humidity made it feel like at least 100 degrees in many places and prompted heat advisories for 18 states.
Unrelenting heat is the norm in the Deep South, but it is unusual in places such as Burlington, Vt., and Portland, Maine, which saw their hottest spring and summer in more than a century.
Meteorologists caution against reading too much into the hot weather, saying such a short-term weather pattern alone cannot be interpreted as a sign of global climate change. The Associated Press
