Hottest Summer on Record

Few western North Carolinians realize that the world's largest archive on climate conditions is maintained in Asheville, the National Climatic Data Center, an arm of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The NCDC is reporting that the summer of 2007 was the hottest in 113 years of record-keeping in this region (these allegedly cool mountains) ... let alone the rest of the country:

"The June-August 2007 summer season ended with a long-lasting heat wave that set more than 2,000 new daily high temperature records across the southern and central U.S."