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Weather at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area is one of the "vital signs" tracked by the Eastern Rivers and Mountains Network, which measures ecosystem health in select national parks in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. For 2020 the verdict was extremely warm with near-normal precipitation: the third-warmest year and the 58th-wettest on record since 1895.
The data are county-scale averages for the counties around the park: Monroe, Northampton and Pike in Pennsylvania and Sussex and Warren in New Jersey, with records from 1895 to 2020 from the National Climate Data Center. Individual weather stations may differ.
Weather and climate
Weather is short-term (minutes to months) change in the atmosphere, what is happening outside now. Climate is what you expect from long-term patterns of 30 years or more: climate is a hot summer, weather is a warm rainy day.
Month by month
| Month | Temperature (°F) | Against long-term average (°F) | Precipitation (in.) | Against long-term average (in.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 31.8 | +7.3 | 2.2 | -1.1 |
| February | 33.7 | +7.9 | 2.7 | -0.3 |
| March | 41.6 | +6.7 | 3.1 | -0.6 |
| April | 44.7 | -1.8 | 4.2 | +0.3 |
| May | 56.2 | -0.9 | 3.0 | -1.1 |
| June | 66.9 | +1.5 | 3.2 | -1.1 |
| July | 74.8 | +4.6 | 4.6 | -0.1 |
| August | 71.3 | +3.2 | 7.3 | +2.9 |
| September | 62.2 | +1.0 | 4.0 | -0.2 |
| October | 52.2 | +2.0 | 3.9 | +0.1 |
| November | 44.1 | +4.9 | 3.0 | -0.6 |
| December | 32.0 | +3.5 | 5.4 | +1.7 |
| Year | 51.0 | +3.3 | 46.6 | -0.1 |
Departures compare 2020 with long-term averages from 1895 to 2019.
Ten months were warmer than normal, and January, February and March were each more than 6.5°F above their averages. Precipitation was close to average for the year but uneven: August was 2.9 inches above average, and December 1.7 inches above, while January, May and June were each about an inch below.
A century of change
Annual average temperature across these counties has risen about 0.27°F per decade since 1895, and annual precipitation has also increased.
Annual average temperature (°F) and annual total precipitation (in.) for the counties around the park, 1895 to 2020, with dashed lines for linear estimates of change. NPS figure.
National Park Service scientists project that by 2100 the park's annual average temperature will rise by 3.2 to 9.4°F, from the best-case to the worst-case scenario, and annual total precipitation by 8 to 15 percent, according to a 2018 study led by Gonzalez.
Sources
- National Park Service, Eastern Rivers and Mountains Network, "2020 Weather In Review: Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/2020-weather-in-review-delaware-water-gap-national-recreation-area.htm); the seasonal ranking figures, whose labels disagree with the monthly table, and a photograph credited to a Flickr user are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
In these publicationsDelaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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