Were you Albuquerque folks feelin' cranky when you woke up this morning, like you really hadn't gotten a good night's sleep? Those of you who escaped to the mountains for a bit of cool had the right idea. With an overnight low in Albuquerque of 71 F, the rest of you just lived through, by one measure, the third-warmest month in Albuquerque history.

The measure in this case is the overnight low. The daytime highs have been unusually warm too, but not as extreme. My amateur calculation of the overnight low average is 68.5 F. That's 3.9 F above the long-term average, going back to 1919, third behind the insufferable July of 2003 (71) and 1951 (68.9). And since July is the hottest month of the year here, those are the three warmest monthly average overnight lows in Albuquerque history period.

Daytime highs with one day to go are 94.2 (expect that to come down a bit, maybe 94.1 when the day's done). That's 2.4 F above average, ranking something like 14th or 15th warmest July - top quartile, but not nearly so far out on the tail of the July curve. That follows a trend in recent decades - more warming in the overnight temperatures, which I will pedantically point out is one of the "fingerprints" of greenhouse-induced global warming.