Prepare to crank up the air conditioning this summer.
Forecasters predict a warmer-than-normal summer in Northeast Pennsylvania, with the potential for more days than usual when the high temperature tops out at 90 degrees or higher, particularly at the outset of the season.
“It looks to me as though we are going to have hot trends, though it’s not going to be hot all summer,” meteorologist Paul Pastelok, a long-range forecasting expert with AccuWeather, said Monday.
Pastelok said the latest models suggest the heat will come on strong in Northeast Pennsylvania and the rest of the mid-Atlantic in June before moderating somewhat in July.
“We are thinking about 2 or 3 degrees above normal for the entire season — June, July and August — but most of that is going to come on the front side of the season and then it will kind of ease back in the second half,” he said.
Since 2011, there have been 58 days when the official high temperature recorded by the National Weather Service at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport hit 90 degrees or higher.
That is an average of 11.6 days annually over the past five years. The area’s normal average for 90-plus days, which the weather service bases on the reference period from 1981 through 2010, is just 6.3 annually.
Pastelok said the number of days this summer when the high at the airport climbs to at least 90 degrees likely will be “in the low to mid teens.”
“I think you will see a few of those happening in June and maybe most of them happening in June and early July,” he said. “Then it will tail off a little bit.”
While temperatures may continue to run above average through July, the heat should not be as extreme or prolonged, he said.
“We think some disturbances will kick off thunderstorms from time to time in the month of July,” Pastelok said. “You’ll get hot ahead of these disturbances and then cool back off for a day or two behind them.”
Ray Brady, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service forecast office in Binghamton, New York, said the NWS Climate Prediction Center’s extended outlook for Northeast Pennsylvania also calls for above-normal temperatures from June through August.
“Of course, this is the same group that forecasted a warm and dry May ... and that’s going to be wrong,” Brady said.