I’ve lived in the Phoenix area for 25 years, so I’ve been through some hot summers, but I grew up in Washington, DC, and those summers are worse!
48C in Palmyra, Syria in July.
Around 115 in Arizona.
109 in Dallas, August 2003.
You went out of town for it? You’re in Studio City, fer chrissakes. It has reached 120 here in the valley quite often.
There was a stretch of a week a couple of years ago where it was in the 110-115 range everyday, and our power was out. No cool breeze, no air conditioning…and no vacancy at the hotels.
115 during a heat wave in Austin maybe 9 years ago. The worst part is that I was stuck in an unairconditoned warehouse spray painting oars and I couldn’t figure out why I was sweating so much… :smack:
110ish I believe. I had soccer practice that day, we played in the shade until it got too small, then moved inside and watched video.
The summer that I moved to Tucson, Arizona, it was 130 deg F. for at least a little while every day. It’s a dry heat, though, and that makes all the difference. I could handle 130 in Tucson just fine once I got used to it, but 90 in San Antonio was much, much hotter in its own subjective way (sticky, sweaty, miserable, mind-baking, BO-inducing, etc.).
103F. Well, maybe. According to the news a while back it’s never gotten hotter than 105 in NH, which struck me as odd because I thought I remembered a day at 107 when I was young. Could have been one of the times I was living in MA, though.
I’m not sure what the maximum was, but I spent the summer of 1978 in Phoenix. It was below 100ºF once (97ºF) and over 110ºF for 3 weeks. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, so between that and Phoenix, I’m guessing I’ve experienced over 115ºF.
Come on, you have got to be kidding. I’ve lived in Tucson for 18 years and it has NEVER been that high here. NOAA gives the record as 117 F. on June 26, 1990. And yes, I was living here on that day, so that’s the highest i’ve experienced.
Well, I can tell you for certain that I am not kidding. However, I cannot guarantee that I was reading an accurate measure at the time, and I defer to your memory and the federal statistics. I swear on my grandmother’s grave (which, incidentally, is in Tucson) that 130 is what it read on my combination atomic-synchronized clock/temperature reader/moon phase indicator/etc. thing in my Graham-Greenlee dorm room at the time. Apparently, the (included, but separate) device that I stuck on the outside wall to read the temperature was in the sun or something. Well, shit, what are ya gonna do? Either it’s in the sun or it’s in the shade.
Anyway, apparently I have misled you, Dopers of the world. For that, I sincerely apologize. But it was definitely over 100 regularly and it was definitely the hottest weather I’ve ever been in, and 85-95 in South Texas humidity definitely felt a lot worse.
I grew to like the Tucson heat. It feels so…clean. Whenever I’m in La Mesa in the summer, which is as close as the San Diego metropolitan area gets to a dry heat, I can feel just a tinge of that “clean heat” feeling, and it makes me miss Arizona.
And when I’m in La Mesa, I’m usually hanging out with a guy who grew up in Chicago, and he thinks I’m fucking nuts when the peg hits 90+ in La Mesa and the first thing that comes to my mind is “I wish I were in Arizona right now”. He’s probably right. C’est la vie.
ETA: Do not allow the jovial tone of this post to fool you into thinking that I’m kidding. I am very, very serious. I don’t mention my grandmother’s grave fercrissakes unless I am 130% sure of what I’m saying.
Oh god, probably back in 2005, we had a weekend in Chicago where it got to 110 both days and that’s not including the heat index. And if you know what Midwestern summers are like (HUMID), you can imagine how horrible it was.
For prolonged heat though, the worst for me was last summer here in Bulgaria. The heat was awful (a bunch of people died throughout the Balkans, mostly in Greece) and it just went ON and ON and ON. It was in the high 30s pretty much every single day of July and August. And air conditioning is pretty rare here, so it wasn’t even easy to escape.
I pushed 120ºF while I was on TDY in Saudi Arabia, but 110ºF with ~100% humidity in FL felt much more unbearable.
Probably the 114 F in Presidio, Texas. I was working in an unairconditioned produce shed and I distinctly remember even my shoes being saturated with sweat.
I’ve no way to verify the 117 south of Laredo on an oil rig. The thermometer, always accurate beforehand, broke on that day and remained stuck at 117 from then on.
I was at a conference in Chicago in July 1995, when 800 people died during the heat wave. I think the high temperature my last day there was 107. I went to Wrigley that night to see the Cubs play the Reds. Gametime temp, at 8 PM central…103.
Man, it was hot.
I was using the official recorded temp for that 115, it seems that it reached over 120 though. I wasn’t sure if we had hit that here since the highest I had heard was 118 in Woodland Hills.
The hottest temperature I’m aware of having been in on a specific date was this past summer when I spent a day in Vegas at the beginning of a road trip. July 5, 116 degrees.
Fortunately, when my car broke down on the way back and I got stuck in Vegas on July 9, it was only 110. :rolleyes:
Having lived in SoCal all my life and spent lots of summers driving to and from Vegas (and one fun day filming a Super 8 movie in Dumont Dunes), it would not surprise me to learn that I’d been in hotter temperatures than that.
The weekend that the majority of those folks died my husband and I MOVED INTO AN UNAIRCONDITIONED APARTMENT. Pal, you don’t know the meaning of hot until you’ve carried a couch up two flights of stairs in 104 degree heat.
But, when I went to Vegas for the first time, it was 114 degrees and I stepped out of the car and FELT MY CONTACTS DRY TO MY EYES. It was just a perfect illustration of how f-ing hot it was.
However, perception of the heat factors a lot more to me. I went up to Canada two years ago in June, way up by Red Bay, where it just doesn’t get sweltering hot, and it was like 34 degrees during the day, 30 at night. No airconditioning, one little fan, and every picture taken that week, featured tomato faced sweaty vacationers.
115 at Toroweap Station on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We all just sat in the shade. It was my first experience with real, honest-to-god dry heat and what a difference it made. Beowulf is right about DC summers being worse.