It’s official: Hottest summer ever for Salt Lake City

The Salt Lake City heat broke parking meters and an Interstate 15 onramp on its way to shattering the big one: Hottest summer ever.

June started the sizzle, then July turned into the hottest for the city since record-keeping started in 1874.And although Tropical Depression Ivo brought rain and cooled the air, August still managed to join July in the sun and basked in the honor of hottest August on record.

“This [is] far and away the warmest summer,” said Eric Schoening, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City, having just calculated the average temperature for all three months. Though the season does not end until the fall equinox on Sept. 22, meteorologists define the summer months strictly as the entirety of June, July and August.

The previous record holder was 2007.

Salt Lake City even broke a couple smaller records on its way to the top this year, and came just short of another.

More subtlety, climbing to victory in the dark, the city took home the “hottest summer nights” crown. Temperatures refused to plunge much after the sun set. The average nighttime lows in June came within half a degree of beating the month’s record, then ramped up and topped the records for July and August, said Simon Wang of the Utah Climate Center.

It also was a historic summer for Rocky Mountain Power.

Dave Eskelsen, spokesman for Rocky Mountain Power, said the electric company set a new system peak record on July 1, a day when temperatures reached a daily record 104 degrees. That power-consumption record topped a record in 2012, which itself exceeded a record in 2011.

The heat also got to downtown parking meters, which broke down in late June. The estimated loss of revenue during the outage, which lasted 12 days, was $90,000.

The baking heat also buckled the 600 North onramp to southbound I-15, as well as portions of I-15 near Point of the Mountain, I-15 in Clearfield, and on U.S. 40 in Summit County and a lane of Interstate 215 near 3400 South.

On Friday, Salt Lake City also beat the record for amount of 95-degree days during the season. The old record was 51.