As record temperatures swept through the Midwest and trees bloomed early across the Northeast, lots of talk focused on what an unusually warm start spring was having. The folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have now crunched the numbers, and found that it wasn’t just unusually warm\u2014March was bizarrely hot. With 15,000 record high temperatures set in the US, it was far and away the warmest March in the nation’s history, and only a single month\u2014January of 2006\u2014was as far off from the monthly average.<\/p>\n
Only one of the 48 contiguous states (Washington) was below normal, and a huge slice down the center of the country was bathed in bright red in NOAA’s map, indicative of record high temperatures. The heatwave was partly responsible for moving the first quarter of the year into the top slot of the US record books. The high temperatures also kicked off an unusually early spring cluster of tornadoes in the Midwest.<\/p>\n