I’m sure you guys heard of the 6 feet of snow in South Africa. That is crazy never knew it could snow in those parts. Fascinating what Mother Nature can do

plus there's probably a big overlap in the % area of a state where a high record is likely or even possible and the % of that area being corn/bean/farm fields. At least for the midwest, anyways. Not many records coming the eastern half of NE, KS, SD or northern half of MN.

Looks like a sure daytime high in the 50’s IMBY today, but it was 63 at midnight.

You are 100% right. The silver falls data clearly demonstrates this. The area was logged heavily between 1880-1920, the period of record began in 1938, once the forest matured the average temps noticeably DROPPED. Obviously that’s not a trend we have seen at most stations in our region, but especially average highs are much cooler over the past 30 years than they were in the 1940-70 period… There is no other explanation I can think of for this.

I think we all seem to agree on here that land use changes make a massive difference for surface temperature readings. What I think is being understated is that these changes can also have a significant impact on the regional level. I think there has also been mostly unanimous agreement on here that surface temperature records are not particularly useful for global climate change discussion. So I really hate it when climate deniers bring up the 1930s records as evidence along those lines. On the flip side, meteorologists need to be careful about climate attribution when high temperature records are broken. In short, long tail distributions are a PITA to work with statistically.