fri, 13-may-2016, 06:02

This morning’s weather forecast:

SUNNY. HIGHS IN THE UPPER 70S TO LOWER 80S. LIGHT WINDS.

May 13th seems very early in the year to hit 80 degrees in Fairbanks, so I decided to check it out. What I’m doing here is selecting all the dates where the temperature is above 80°F, then ranking those dates by year and date, and extracting the “winner” for each year (where rank is 1).

WITH warm AS (
   SELECT extract(year from dte) AS year, dte,
      c_to_f(tmax_c) AS tmax_f
   FROM ghcnd_pivot
   WHERE station_name = 'FAIRBANKS INTL AP'
      AND c_to_f(tmax_c) >= 80.0),
ranked AS (
   SELECT year, dte, tmax_f,
      row_number() OVER (PARTITION BY year
                         ORDER BY dte) AS rank
   FROM warm)
SELECT dte,
   extract(doy from dte) AS doy,
   round(tmax_f, 1) as tmax_f
FROM ranked
WHERE rank = 1
ORDER BY doy;

And the results:

Earliest 80 degree dates, Fairbanks Airport
Date Day of year High temperature (°F)
1995-05-09 129 80.1
1975-05-11 131 80.1
1942-05-12 132 81.0
1915-05-14 134 80.1
1993-05-16 136 82.0
2002-05-20 140 80.1
2015-05-22 142 80.1
1963-05-22 142 84.0
1960-05-23 144 80.1
2009-05-24 144 80.1

If we hit 80°F today, it’ll be the fourth earliest day of year to hit that temperature since records started being kept in 1904.

Update: We didn’t reach 80°F on the 13th, but got to 82°F on May 14th, tied with that date in 1915 for the fourth earliest 80 degree temperature.

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