Record warmth and highs up to 90 degrees are possible this week in Philly
It will feel like midseason at Citizens Bank Park this week when the Phils host the Cubs
Whatever else goes wrong with the Phillies this week, they won’t be able to blame an early-season chill.
By Wednesday, when they host the final game of a series against the Chicago Cubs, it may feel more like what would be expected when Citizens Bank Park hosts the All-Star Game in mid-July.
The highs Wednesday are expected to be in the upper 80s, challenging the record of 88 degrees, set in 1941
The record bar is a tad higher for Thursday, when it reached 90 in 2002, but that is definitely within reach, said Tom Kines, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc.
Monday’s projected high in the low 80s, normal for mid-June, is likely to be the coolest day of the week.
No significant rain is in sight, and that evidently has some bearing on the warm spell.
What explains the pulse of heat in the Philly region
Officially, Philadelphia has had below-normal rainfall for seven consecutive months. New Jersey remains in a drought warning, and the inter-agency U.S. Drought Monitor has most of the region in moderate drought.
That probably is contributing to the pulse of heat, meteorologists said: When it’s dry, the sun can devote energy to heating rather than spending some of it on evaporation.
However, the bigger factor likely is the state of the season, said Kines. Although those first, magical green leaves are replacing the blossoms, the trees still aren’t leafed out and aren’t quite ready to provide shade.
The foliage will become ever thirstier, and the soil moisture is well below normal, according to the government’s Climate Prediction Center. However, the soil has been able to retain some of the moisture it hosted during the winter.
The region benefitted from an extraordinarily durable snow cover in January and February, and it has been a major asset in the growing season, in effect a ponderously acting watering system.
“Definitely having such a lengthy snowpack helped a lot,” said Joseph DeSilva, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly. “If not, our drought situation probably would be much worse at this point.”
No significant rain is in the long-range outlook
And it likely would be worsening: No significant rain is in the forecast for the next several days.
In the meantime, the run of June-July temperatures looks like it’s going to extend into the weekend, when the Atlanta Braves come to town to play the Phillies.
The warmth may be a boon to the quality of play, at least based on a comprehensive study of 22,000 games by University of Nevada researchers.
They found that in warm weather versus chilly conditions, “runs scored, batting average, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, and home runs significantly increase, while walks significantly decrease.”
Whether the Phillies’ bats remain cold is an open question.
