It’s the first week of March and you’re ready to grab your coat and head out the door, but you should probably check the weather before you go because things are heating up.
Michael Anand is a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Albuquerque and is tracking the heat.
“Normally, we're supposed to be in the upper 50s for late February, early March, and we're close to 80. So yeah, it's pretty warm,” Anand said.
This past weekend brought record temperatures for the cities of Albuquerque, Roswell, Socorro, and most of southwest New Mexico. The unseasonably warm weather broke the previous daily record by five degrees.
"It's mainly because we've had this pretty strong area of high pressure over Mexico. And we're on the northern fringe of that high pressure,” Anand said.
In simple terms, high pressure causes air to “sink” and that compression creates warmer temperatures.
While this weather is unusual, students like Sadie Lang and Rayray Olivas at the University of New Mexico were taking advantage of it.
“I’m spending so much time outside, I’ve had picnics out here,” Lang said. “Yea, I’m doing homework outside, studying outside,” Olivas said.
Although a warm late-winter isn’t necessarily unwelcome, it is confusing for folks like UNM freshman Megan Taylor.
“I thought the groundhog said like, there was gonna be six more weeks [of winter], so I don’t know what’s going on there. The groundhog lied so hard,” Tylor said.
Maybe we can’t trust our furry friends to be weathermen.
The National Weather Service predicts it should cool down later this week, but it won’t last long as temperatures crawl back into the high 60’s early next week.
The first day of Spring is Friday, March 20.
