KANSAS CITY, Mo. — T. J. Abogado huffed and puffed, his buzz cut and face sprinkled with sweat. He was wearing short navy blue shorts, but his red T-shirt was now in his hand.
"It got too hot," Mr. Abogado, 27, said on Monday afternoon after jogging a few miles on a sunny day that felt a lot more like June than January.
Was this athletic dedication on display last week?
"No, not at all," he said. "I was in the house hibernating."
Last week the temperature here dropped to 8 degrees, a low for the month. On Monday, the mercury topped out at 74, breaking a 96-year-old record high for the date.
"It's like, 'Jesus, thank you for this wonderful weather,' " Larry Newell, 58, said as he sat shirtless on a swiveling exercise chair in a park.
Winter around here has had all the ups and downs of a choppy ocean.
One day, the air coming from people's shivering nostrils is visible as they shimmy through the streets (or, perhaps more aptly, race from their cars to the nearest building) in puffy down coats. The next day, as was the case on Monday, they shed layers, don tank tops and short shorts, and kick back at restaurant patios to let the sun soak their faces. The temperature changes have been so sudden and extreme that even weather nerds could get caught in the sun with a few too many layers.
"Basically, we have been kind of on a roller-coaster ride temperature-wise across the middle part of the country for the past couple weeks," said Jim Keeney, the weather program manager for the National Weather Service's central region office based here.
Meteorologically, large temperature swings are not that uncommon in Kansas City. The city sits on something of a fence between the warm air of the south and the frigid air of the north, said John Eise, the climate services program manager for the Weather Service's central region.
"That's Midwest weather for you," Lindsey Blakeman, 29, said on Monday as the sun shined off her large sunglasses while she slouched in a patio chair and clutched a tall Starbucks cup.
But even by this city's standards, Monday stood out for just how warm it was. While it is not unusual for the temperature to rise into the high 40s after a cold snap, eclipsing 70 degrees was something people here were not used to experiencing in the week before the Super Bowl.
Part of the reason the upswings in temperature have been higher than usual this winter is that the jet stream has been sitting farther north than usual, Mr. Keeney said. That has kept a lot of the cold air and moisture farther to the north, while the warmer air from the south has flowed into the region, he said.
"This is kind of strange, to say the least," Joel Gard, 54, an insurance broker who lives in nearby Overland Park, Kan., said as he took his regular lunchtime walk around a park in Kansas City.
Usually, Mr. Gard wears a long trench coat. But on Monday, his long-sleeve white button down shirt and tie felt like a bit much.
"I'm too hot now," he said.
Naturally, extreme weather and temperature shifts stoke concern over climate change and global warming. While temperatures have risen globally, Mr. Eise said, there are no definitive studies to suggest that the temperature swings in Kansas City are getting worse or that they are the result of climate change.
"It's just on too short of a time scale and too small of a sample size," he said, later adding, "That's not to say that it doesn't have an impact on it."
As of Sunday, the average temperature here for January was 32.5 degrees, nearly three and a half degrees above the normal January average. But it was nowhere near the all-time-high January average of 60.5 degrees, which happened in 1909, 1944 and 1967. The largest single-day temperature swing on record in January in Kansas City was 57 degrees on Jan. 15, 1953, when the high was 64 degrees and the low was 7.
Around here, where "global warming" can be a bad word, most people seemed to shake off any notion that their postcard-perfect day was part of an ominous, larger climate trend.
"There's no point in freaking out over every little scientific discovery," Ms. Blakeman said. "You enjoy these days while you have them because tomorrow it's going to be negative 20."
Not quite. But the temperature here is expected to dip to 13 degrees by Thursday night.
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