Environment
It's a Historic Year for Temperature Extremes
In the U.S., we're living in two countries: one scourged by heat and the other bitten by cold.
This year is shaping up to be one of the weirder ones in America's weather history. That's because we now seem to be living in two geographically separate nations: one scalded by unbearable heat, the other bitten by waves of unusual cold.
In a typical year, the U.S. has either mostly warm or mostly cool temperature extremes (meaning values at the top or bottom of a historical range of temperatures). For instance, years in the late '70s were marked by extreme cold throughout the country, while the 2000s featured increasingly frequent baths of abnormally hot weather, as pictured in this NOAA graph of January-to-July daytime highs: