Washington, D.C., recorded a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit at Reagan National Airport, shattering a daily high-temperature record that had endured since 1872. The previous mark of 101 degrees was first set more than 150 years ago and matched twice since then, in 1873 and 1966. The new reading, confirmed by the National Weather Service Baltimore/Washington Forecast Office in its official Record Event Report, makes this the hottest observation ever logged for this calendar date at the capital’s primary weather station.
A 154-year benchmark falls at Reagan National
The 102-degree reading was recorded at the station formally cataloged as GHCND:USW00013743, which corresponds to Washington Reagan National in NOAA’s Climate Data Online system. That station serves as the official daily observation point for the D.C. metropolitan area and feeds into the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily dataset maintained by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Any temperature that exceeds a prior daily record triggers an automated Record Event Report from the local NWS forecast office, and the one-degree jump from 101 to 102 was enough to erase a benchmark that had survived the Gilded Age, two World Wars, and decades of urban expansion around the Potomac.
The prior record of 101 degrees was not a one-off anomaly. It was reached three separate times across three different centuries, in 1872, 1873, and 1966, according to the NWS documentation. That repetition at 101 degrees over such a long span made the ceiling appear durable. Breaking it by a full degree signals that the atmospheric conditions driving the latest heat event went well beyond what this date has historically produced. For residents, the difference between 101 and 102 may feel marginal, but from a climatological perspective, each new step above a long-standing extreme marks a meaningful shift in the upper bound of local heat.
Residents and workers across the capital region feel the consequences of triple-digit heat in direct, physical terms. Federal buildings, Metro platforms, and outdoor construction sites all become harder to manage safely when temperatures push past 100 degrees. Power grids face peak demand, and heat-related emergency calls tend to spike as vulnerable populations struggle to stay cool. The record also carries planning implications: infrastructure engineers, public health agencies, and utility operators use historical temperature extremes to set design thresholds and emergency triggers. When the ceiling rises, those thresholds may need revision, from cooling capacity in government offices to the timing of heat advisories and opening of cooling centers.
How NWS and NCEI verified the 102-degree observation
The verification process for a daily temperature record at a first-order NWS station like Reagan National follows a well-established chain. Automated sensors at the airport feed real-time data into the Automated Surface Observing System, which NWS meteorologists review against quality-control protocols before issuing a Record Event Report. That report names the station, the observed value, the prior record, and the years in which the prior record was set. In this case, the report lists 102 degrees as the new record and 101 degrees as the old one, with explicit attribution to 1872, 1873, and 1966. If a preliminary value were later found to be erroneous, the office would issue an update, but no such correction accompanied this event.
The underlying data archive sits within NOAA’s data infrastructure, where Climate Data Online allows anyone to pull the full period-of-record for station USW00013743. The station metadata confirms its location, elevation, and active date range, while Local Climatological Data summaries, sometimes called F-6 forms, provide daily breakdowns of high and low temperatures, precipitation, and other variables. These forms are the same documents that NWS offices consult when comparing a new observation against historical extremes. The entire pipeline, from sensor to archive, runs through the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA and its subordinate centers, providing a consistent framework for record-keeping across the country.
Even with this standardized process, context matters. A single reading can be influenced by short-lived factors such as wind direction, cloud cover, or the timing of an afternoon thunderstorm. Quality control procedures are designed to flag obvious outliers or sensor malfunctions, but they do not adjust for broader environmental changes around the station. That means the 102-degree value is both a weather event-a hot day driven by a particular atmospheric setup-and a data point in a longer climate record shaped by gradual shifts in land use and regional temperatures.
One question that the available documentation does not fully resolve is whether the 1872 reading was taken at the same physical location as today’s station. Reagan National Airport did not exist until 1941. Earlier D.C. weather observations were collected at downtown sites, and station relocations introduce potential discontinuities in the record. The NWS treats the modern airport station as the successor to earlier D.C. observation points for the purpose of daily record comparisons, but the shift from a dense urban core to a riverside airport tarmac could affect how temperatures at the two sites compare. The Record Event Report does not include a note on this transition, leaving some uncertainty about how directly the 19th-century readings align with today’s measurements.
Open questions about accelerating heat records in the capital
The broken record raises a broader analytical question: are daily temperature records at Reagan National falling more frequently than they used to? A testable approach would compare the annual count of broken daily records at station USW00013743 against counts at nearby non-urban stations in the GHCN-Daily network since 2000. If the airport station is breaking records at a faster clip than surrounding rural cooperative stations, two explanations compete. One is that the urban heat island effect, amplified by decades of development around the Potomac corridor, is inflating readings at the airport relative to the wider region. The other is that the entire region is warming, and the airport simply has a longer, more complete record that makes new highs easier to document.
Answering that question rigorously would require assembling a dataset of daily maximum temperatures from Reagan National and several comparison stations, then counting how many times each site surpassed its historical high for a given date. Analysts would need to account for differences in period-of-record length, station moves, and instrumentation changes. Statistical techniques could then determine whether the trend in record-breaking days at the airport significantly exceeds that of nearby sites. At present, the available reporting does not provide that level of analysis, so the 102-degree mark stands as a notable but isolated data point rather than definitive proof of an acceleration in record highs.
The available reporting does not include hourly temperature traces from the day in question, nor does it detail how long the reading remained at or above 102 degrees. That information would help clarify whether the record was set by a brief spike during peak afternoon heating or by a more prolonged period of extreme heat. Without it, the narrative is necessarily focused on the single verified maximum. Still, the fact that the temperature crossed the century mark at all on this date is enough to place the day in a rare category for Washington’s climate history.
For policymakers and planners in the capital region, the new record is less a curiosity than a signal. Design standards for transportation systems, building cooling loads, and emergency response plans often rely on historical extremes as guardrails. As those extremes inch higher, the margin of safety built into older assumptions can erode. Updating those assumptions will depend on a fuller picture of how often records like this are being broken, how quickly nighttime temperatures are warming, and whether heatwaves are becoming longer or more humid. The 102-degree reading at Reagan National does not answer those questions on its own, but it underscores why they can no longer be treated as abstract concerns.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
