The heat is on
Near record temperatures and red flag warnings on tap this week for Albuquerque
Well, you can’t call it sweltering or Phoenix-like, but Albuquerque on Monday managed to tie the highest temperature on record for April 5.
At 4:59 p.m. Monday, the official high was 81 degrees, matching the record set in 1972. The lowest reading for Monday was 48 degrees at 5:15 a.m., about 8 degrees above normal and significantly above the lowest temperature on record for the date — 19 degrees, set in 1945 — according to Todd Shoemake, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Albuquerque.
To put Monday’s high temperatures in perspective, the average high is 66 degrees, and the normal lows are around 40 degrees, Shoemake said.
Sunday’s high temperature of 80 was just a couple of degrees shy of the record of 82 degrees set in 1943.
“If you kind of look back on the last 20 or 30 years, our normal temperatures are increasing, and that’s largely attributed to climate change and urbanization,” Shoemake said.
That’s especially true for nighttime temperatures, “which are really creeping up more so than the daytime high temperatures, and a lot of that is all the concrete and asphalt,” which acts like a heat sink and continues to radiate that heat back out long after the sun sets, Shoemake said.
National Weather Service forecasters also issued red-flag high-wind warnings for 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, the latter for all of north and central New Mexico due to strong winds, low humidity and what they call “an unstable atmosphere.”
Sustained winds of 20 to 35 mph, with gusts to 55 mph are expected, with humidity dropping below 10% and dipping below 5% in the Rio Grande Valley.