Record-setting March heat blasts suburbs

Kim Kardashian may be Forbes’ hottest overexposed celebrity.

“The Hunger Games” may be the hottest movie in America.

But last month is now officially the hottest March in Chicago history.

Normally, March “comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb” as the saying goes.

Last month, it sort of came in like a blast furnace and went out like a convection oven, relatively speaking.

This March smashed the record for the area’s highest average temperature: 53.8 degrees as of Friday. That breaks the record set in both 1945 and 1910 at 48.6 degrees.

March racked up a record number of eight days that the temps bypassed the 80-degree mark. The Chicago area has hit 80 degrees only 10 other times in March since the early 1870s when weather records started.

“What made the month exceptional was both how warm it got and how long it lasted,” said ABC 7 meteorologist Phil Schwarz. “We hit 87 on March 21. That’s incredible! That’s the warmest ever for so early in the season. It really was an amazing month.”

So what made this March hotter than Hades? The insidious, controversial global warming? Mother Nature giving us fair warning?

“You have to be careful when you take short-term weather events and reach conclusions about longer-term weather events such as global warming,” Schwarz said. “You can’t just take what happened in one month say, ‘Ah, ha, there’s global warming!’”

So what actually did happen?

Charles Mott of Westmont works at the National Weather Service office in Romeoville. He said what happened was simple:

“It was a summertime high pressure system that set up over the eastern and Midwestern regions of the U.S. in March which drove warm air from the Gulf of Mexico not just over us but all the way up through Canada,” he reported. “The high didn’t move, so the warm air just kept coming.”

That means suburban homeowners have lots of de-icing salt sitting around in their garages now, next to lots of underutilized snow removal equipment.

Like all those snow throwers sold at the Arlington Heights Lowes store.

“We sold out of snow throwers several times this year,” said Streamwood resident Leslie Heger, who has worked in the seasonal sales department at the store since 2005. “People were going crazy! They didn’t want to end up like last year when they had all that snow and not enough equipment.”

Heger remained pragmatic. “It’s just a freak year,” she said. “We’ll get it all back.”

ABC 7’s Schwarz, a homeowner, said he still had a small amount of salt on hand.

“Remember that is Chicago,” he said. ”It could still snow in May.”