Hottest summers in Michigan history

To say that it’s been absurdly hot in Michigan lately is an understatement. The worst part is that, at the time of writing, it’s not even technically summer yet.

This week alone, temperatures will be consistently above 30 degrees Celsius and there is a chance that this heat will continue.

But are we experiencing one of the hottest summers ever in Michigan?

While that’s unlikely, it doesn’t negate the fact that Michigan is unusually hot for mid-June.

The summer of 1936 was a historically terrible summer for the entire country, and Michigan was no exception. In Michigan alone, over 500 people died that year (over 5,000 nationwide) due to heat that reached temperatures over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. You can learn more about that summer at the following link.

Many records were set in 1936 that still stand today, including the highest temperature ever recorded in Michigan: 112 °C on July 13, 1936 in Milo, Michigan.

Hopefully temperatures won’t get anywhere near those levels. While we have the benefit of air conditioning and other technology that Americans lacked in 1936, it’s still dangerous for Michiganders who simply don’t know how to handle that kind of heat.

Even as a newcomer from the South, the current heat wave is pretty intense. In Sweet Home, Alabama, it seems to be well over 90 degrees most of the day from late May to early September. Yeah, no thanks. I don’t miss it.

But 1936 was not the only notable heat wave to hit Michigan.

In 1995, temperatures were 90 degrees or higher for 24 days, but a five-day stretch in mid-July was particularly unbearable, as the average high temperature in southwest Michigan was 97 degrees.

In both 1988 and 2012, there were 37 days with temperatures above 90 degrees in the state, nearly two additional weeks of unusual heat in the Mitten State. The summer of 1988, like 1936, brought very little rain, which made the summer even worse. That summer, Flint saw less than an inch of rain and Detroit had five days with temperatures above 100 degrees.

The summers of 2005, 2012 and 2016 take the top three places in terms of average warmest temperatures in the Detroit area: in 2005 and 2012, average temperatures reached 74.8 degrees, and in 2016, the average was 74.9 degrees.

Even though we have a scorching hot start to 2024, hopefully our summer won’t be quite as harsh as those years.