Summer of ’14 cooler, drier than normal, but not a record

Nathan Rogers, 11, flies down the water slide as a pair of sunbathers soak up the sun at the Perrysburg Municipal Pool.

Toledo’s summer of 2014 has entered the books as cooler than normal, but not enough to make any Top 10 list.

The average daily mean temperature at Toledo Express Airport for June, July, and August, which are the months climatologists consider to be summer in the Northern Hemisphere, was 70.2 degrees, the National Weather Service office in Cleveland has reported.

That’s 1.3 degrees cooler than normal, but far short of even 10th place on Toledo’s list of coolest summers. The coolest ever was in 1897, with an average daily mean of 65.4 degrees, while No. 10 occurred in 1967, with an average of 68.5 degrees.

Summer was also drier than normal in Toledo. The 7.34 inches of rain that fell between June 1 and Aug. 31 was 2.61 inches below normal, but well above the record low of 3.30 inches set in 1930, and more than 1½ inches wetter than 10th place on that list.

Most of summer’s abnormality occurred in July, which was significantly cooler than normal and very dry. Although August started out cool, a warming trend during the month’s second half brought the end result up to just 0.3 degree below average.

With 2.53 inches of rain, August also was 0.62 inch drier than normal, and 2.04 inches of that rain fell on a single day, the 11th.