This is a snow joke.
Record snowfall was reported at Philadelphia International Airport on Sunday while temperatures soared to 94 degrees Fahrenheit, a puzzling contradiction.
The National Weather Service’s Philadelphia/Mount Holly office noted that a new one-day snowfall total had been recorded over Penn State that afternoon, breaking the previous record set on July 14, 1870.
The agency said the trace amounts of snow recorded in the report were actually small hailstones that fell during a thunderstorm.
“Because hail is frozen precipitation, this counts as a ‘trace’ of snow in weather reports,” NWS Mount Holly said. said in a social media post.“So we had record amounts of snowfall every day.”
Although this strange weather phenomenon is rare, it’s not unheard of.
Hailstorms occur during the summer months, and “spots of snow” have been reported over the airport 13 times between 1911 and this Sunday.
The last time summer “snow” fell over the airport was in August 2011, when it fell twice that month, according to the NWS.
But the latest summer “snow” has been even more shocking, as temperatures across much of the country have soared into the 90s and are now in their second week of feeling like triple digits.
Philadelphia and other Northeastern cities have been under extreme heat warnings for several days.
Philadelphia city officials declared a heat health emergency this week from Monday through Wednesday, the second in the city this season after the city’s health department first declared one last month.
