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The weather books on meteorological summer close at midnight Tuesday night into Wednesday. When the final tally is done, it looks like the meteorological summer of 2021 will edge out 1988 as the hottest summer on record in the Twin Cities. 

By my preliminary math, it looks like our average temperature for the Twin Cities in summer 2021 will come in around 75.6 degrees. If that number verifies it would just top the summer of 1988 which had an average temperature of 75.4 degrees. 

You can see on the temperatures chart from June through August below that temperature ran above average pretty consistently this summer. There were few cold spikes and relatively few record highs, even during our prolonged June heatwave. 

 really drove the trend toward a record warm summer in Minnesota. Temperatures in June ran 5 to 10 degrees above average across much of Minnesota. 

Here are some of the more notable records from our June heat wave from the Minnesota DNR Climate Working Group.

Records of note set during June 2021 heat wave:

Weather and Climate News

Updraft® - Minnesota Weather News

Paul Huttner

Author

When the final numbers are in, it looks like 2021 will be the hottest (meteorological) summer on record for the Twin Cities. 

A group of girls do back flips into a lake. 

Tim Evans for MPR News, file

Summer 2021 temperature graph for the Twin Cities area

This was likely the hottest meteorological summer on record in the Twin Cities

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