John Wheeler: Today is the anniversary of the Fargo and North Dakota temperature records

FARGO — On July 6, 1936, the temperature at the Moorhead office of what was then called the U.S. Weather Bureau reached a sweltering 114 degrees. The Weather Bureau, now the National Weather Service, was housed at that time in what was the Federal Building on Main Avenue in Moorhead, in what is now the Rourke Museum. The official weather recordings for Fargo-Moorhead were made at that office in Moorhead from 1881 into the early 1940s. Hector International Airport, however, had started making its own weather recordings in the 1930s, so there is a period of overlap.

Interestingly, the temperature at the airport that afternoon was 115 degrees, but that figure is not in the Fargo climate record because the official Fargo-Moorhead weather station was the one in Moorhead at the time. So the station record high temperature for Fargo was actually measured in Moorhead. The North Dakota state temperature record was set in Steele at 121 degrees that same day.

John Wheeler is Chief Meteorologist for WDAY, a position he has had since May of 1985. Wheeler grew up in the South, in Louisiana and Alabama, and cites his family’s move to the Midwest as important to developing his fascination with weather and climate. Wheeler lived in Wisconsin and Iowa as a teenager. He attended Iowa State University and achieved a B.S. degree in Meteorology in 1984. Wheeler worked about a year at WOI-TV in central Iowa before moving to Fargo and WDAY..