Adapted from the 2014 BAMS State of the Climate report, these maps show the frequency of warm days and cool nights in 2014 compared to the long-term average. Meteorologists examined the range of daytime high and nighttime low temperatures during 1961-1990  and divided it into brackets, or percentiles. Days with high temperatures warmer than 90 percent of the 1961–1990 record are considered warm days. Nights with low temperatures in the bottom 10 percent of the temperature record are considered cool nights.

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        The warm days map shows places where the frequency of warm days was higher than the 1961-1990 average in shades of red and places where the frequency of warm days was below the long-term average in blue. The cool nights map uses the opposite color convention: places, where the frequency of cool nights was below-average, are colored with “warm” colors (red, orange), and places, where the frequency of cool nights was above average, are colored in shades of blue.

In terms of both warm days and cool nights, cool conditions prevailed across large parts of North America, especially the eastern half of the continent. Across much of the rest of the globe, though, 2014 conditions were unusually warm compared to 1961–1990.