How Many 'Hot' Days In A Calendar Year ?

The motor route from Alice Springs, greysrigging can elobarate

I'll use the same 35 C threshold as greysrigging, also seeing as that's the cutoff for what I personally consider "hot". It's not an every-year occurrence around here, so I'll add things up by decade and see what trend the numbers hold.

1870s: 3
1880s: 3
1890s: 5
1900s: 12
1910s: 23
1920s: 7
1930s: 43
1940s: 22
1950s: 41
1960s: 10
1970s: 22
1980s: 31
1990s: 13
2000s: 3
2010s: 19
2020s: 3 (so far)

Annual average rounds to two (more precisely, 1.69), but there's a lot of variation; it's normal to see none for three or four years in a row, and it's normal to see a week-long heat wave that skews the numbers as well. 1988 was the year with the most on record, with 19, though that was an absolute majority of the hot days for that entire decade. The 1930s are still the decade with the most hot days here, and I suspect the late 19th and very early 20th century had more hot days than are reflected in the official record due to differences in station siting and/or measurement practices leading to diurnal ranges that seem unrealistically small. Post-1900 there doesn't really seem to be a trend in the data.

@coolman18 wow that's profound, you've had as many 90+ F days already since 2020 as you used to get in a decade just checking some numbers on NOWData.