Record temperatures in Bangkok this week?

Don Muang airport maximum daily
temps higher than 38C (102F) since 1951.

So how is Songkran, the hot season water festival week looking in regard to Bangkok hot weather this year ? Yesterday temperatures reached 39 degrees C (102F) at the old Don Muang airport, and the historical record I got from the Department of Meteorology shows that this is not a common occurrence, it happens in about 1 in 4 years over the last 65 years (1951-2013). But then, it is not all that special either, there are a fair number of readings over 39.5 and a few even over 40, especially in the late 1990s.

Do you see a long time trend in maximun temps at Bangkok here? I don't. But then, given the urbanization around the airport, which was surrounded by rice fields when I first arrived here in 1963, we should be surprised that there has not been a steady upward march of hot recordings over the past half century, even aside from any global warming, it having been known for a century that urban areas are generally warmer by 5 degrees or so than country areas.

So if we are looking for evidence of global warming in this record we are not finding it. It is worth considering that most of the records which people are using in this heated debate over temperature trends are also taken in and around airports. Do "climate scientists" pay much attention to microclimate?

For that matter if we are worried about human misery in the tropics, we should look at other weather indications like dew pount which better reflect our capacity to survive in hot weather. We die at dew points of 35 because we cannot dump heat at that level.

The southerly breezes in Bangkok were recently -- about 2 hours before -- flowing northward over the Gulf of Thailand, so along with local microclimatic ground heating from paving and other materials that capture heat, we should look to surface sea temperatures in that shallow gulf for explanations of downtown or airport temperatures.