With the forecast for the potentially dangerous heat building in next week I got to wondering about record highs and if one time period stands out among the others because I'm a weather nerd and that's the kind of random stuff that pops in my head when I'm already clock watching at 7:30am. So I pulled out my weather info for Starkville and got to crunching numbers. Turns out I was right more than I imagined. The 1930's, hands down, is the record high title holder. For Starkville, 40% of our record highs occurred between 1930-1939. Thats 146 days. Of those 146 days, 23 of them were in the year 1930 alone. You history buffs may remember what was going in the 1930's. A little something called the dust bowl. The extreme drought caused all the soil moisture to evaporate so all of the sun's energy could be used to increase ambient air temperature instead of some of it going to evaporating that soil moisture. So while humidity can be an outright pain in the ass, it does serve to keep air temperatures at least somewhat moderated.

Ok. Back to my clock watching. Tuesday - Thursday of next week still look to be the hottest days. Excluding anomalies in the models, the average heat index across MS that time period still looks to be 106-110 with pockets of 113-115 forming in isolated areas.