Growing up in Seattle during the 1970s and 1980s, I just don’t remember the summers being so hot so often as they are now. I remember 80° feeling like a big deal, 85° feeling genuinely hot, and 90° being rare. Today, I feel like we hit 90 degrees nearly every week of the summer.
We had a pool when I was a kid, one of the rare families who had one in Seattle at the time. Unfortunately, the pool was unheated, which meant it was freezing! On a good day I could make it 10-minutes before I’d start shivering and seek the fabulous warmth of a thick towel. Why was our pool so cold? Because there just weren’t enough hot days to naturally warm a Seattle pool back then (thankfully my parents broke down and purchased a heater for the pool when I was in high school).
But that’s all from my memory and memory isn’t perfect, so I wanted to see what the actual data showed. And, thankfully, the good saints at NOAA and the National Weather Service provide daily weather records dating back to 1948 that can be downloaded and analyzed.
The data confirmed what I’d suspected: Seattle is experiencing more warm days than it has historically, and this has increased exponentially since the 1990s.
Historically since 1948 we average just under 28 days per year where we reach 80 degrees per year. In the 1970s, when I was in elementary school, we also averaged just under 28 days over 80 degrees per year, and the 1980s we actually averaged less than the historical average.
In recent years? It’s a totally different story!
Since 2000—and especially since 2020—the average number of 80°, 85°, 90°, and even 95° days has been substantially higher than the historical norm. Since 2020, Seattle has averaged roughly 46% more 80-degree days than the long-term historical average.
Whether a person attributes the change to climate change, long-term climate cycles, or some random combination of factors (maybe even something we’d see in the X Files), Seattle has experienced substantially more warm and hot days over the past few decades and most especially in the past five years than it did in the last century since 1948.
(SELF DEPRECATING ASIDE: One of my great joys in life is self-deprecation, which honestly cracks me up. Too many people in too many parts of the world just take themselves waaaayyyyyyy too seriously, so I like to counter that (also called “zagging”) with self-deprecating remarks since it lightens the mood and also tells the world “I don’t want to play that game of puffing out my chest like some alpha gorilla.” But I’m told this isn’t great branding and since my livelihood — real estate — is partially dependent on branding, I’ve bee trying to get better about this. Still, I can’t resist here. And I’d just like to say that while I have many many many faults, and we all wonder sometimes if we’re losing our memory, I’m grateful to know that the memories I have the weather/climate of the 1970s and 1980s were actually backed by data. It’s not every day that we — especially me — get to look in the mirror and say, “Hey, I was right!.” So woot woot for one of my rare small victories. Thus ends my aside of happy self-deprecation. I NOW RETURN TO MY REGULAR POST).
You may ask, if you’ve read this far, “I thought you were a real estate agent and focused on real estate data? What does this have to do with real estate??” Well, thank you for asking. Because it does indeed have something to do with real estate. These changing summers are influencing how people think about homes. Features that once seemed like luxuries—heat pumps with air conditioning, better insulation, covered outdoor living spaces, shade trees, and even swimming pools—have become noticeably more desirable than they were a generation ago. I myself broke down this past April and installed a heat pump with cooling: while Seattle baked this week we were quite comfortable in our 67 degree home 🙂 Note: I am in no way vested in an HVAC, swimming pool or other temperature-control company in any way).
Thank you for reading. You may contact me at RobMathison@BHHSNW.com or RobInSeattle.com.
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