If you thought with the kids heading back to school summer was coming to an end Mother Nature has other plans.  The hot weather continues and in the past two days it has reached record setting heights.

Yesterday, August 23rd, Denver hit a high temperature of 98 degrees as measured at Denver International Airport.  This tied the previous record high for the date last set in 2009 and previous years.  Thornton fared a bit cooler as we ‘only’ reached 96 degrees.

Despite forecasts calling for cooler temperatures today, the mercury just kept on climbing and topped out at 98 degrees at 3:17pm.  This broke the old record high temperature of the date of 97 degrees set 75 years ago in 1936.  Mercifully, Thornton again was cooler with a high of 95 degrees.

As with all Denver records since 1995 when the National Weather Service moved the city’s official monitoring station to DIA, the records come with an asterisk.  That move of 12 miles has resulted in consistently higher temperatures than what is seen at the historical site at Stapleton or closer to downtown.

Another official station, located at Denver City Park, provides evidence of this over the last two days.  The station is much closer to where historical records were taken and thus can be more accurately used to compare to the past.

That station recorded a high of 97 degrees yesterday and 95 degrees today.  Neither of these would be records had Denver’s station not made the move to a different microclimate at DIA.

Read more about this problem with Denver’s climate records on Examiner.com: The fallacy of Denver’s climate records: Weather station move skews data