First 100-degree day of 2010 marks start of hot season

Soon, the wind will blow, and it will not cool you off.

It will make your skin hurt.

Walking outside will make your face feel like it did on Thanksgiving when you opened the oven to check on the turkey, and you forgot to turn your head away, and a blast of superheated dry air smacked you in the face and curled your eyelashes back and took your breath away, and for just an instant you thought, "Oh, my goodness. I believe I might go blind."

You will get in your car, and you will leave the top layer of your skin on the steering wheel.

You will walk barefoot across the sidewalk and regret it.

You will drink down a quart of water in one swift gulp.

You will consider sneaking into the pool at Arizona Charlie's to cool off.

Wish you'd tinted your windows.

Brought a hat.

Worked graveyard.

You will curse Las Vegas and the idiots who decided to build a city in the middle of the desert.

Welcome to summertime.

The astronomers who study such things tell us that summer begins here this year at 4:28 a.m. June 21.

The astronomers seem to be off.

As anyone who's lived here for more than a year can tell you, summer in Las Vegas begins when the thermometer hits triple digits and refuses to back down.

Elsewhere, the folks who live in happy little places, where you can actually enjoy the great outdoors in the summer, might measure things differently.

Maybe summer really does begin June 21st in those places. Maybe it begins when they put the long-sleeved shirts away for the season. Maybe it's when the kids get out of school. Maybe Memorial Day weekend.

But no. Not here.

The National Weather Service forecasters said it kissed 100 for the first time this year on Thursday at the official recording station at McCarran International Airport. Unfortunately, it's going to be as hot or a degree or two hotter today.

The good times are over.

If this year is like last year and the year before that and the average of every year going back four decades, the temperature will hit 100 degrees 72 times this summer before it returns to being simply hot outside, and the breeze actually cools you off, and the kids can go to the park before 7 at night, and the parking lot at the grocery store doesn't seem to be melting beneath your feet.

Normally, if there is such a thing as normal, weather service data say we should have hit 100 last month. The average day Las Vegas first hits 100 is May 25. The earliest ever was May 1, back in 1947. Once, in 1965, the hell did not begin until June 30.

John Adair, a weather service meteorologist, said the area could be in for a hot summer this year.

And that's despite a cooler than normal spring, where windy storm after windy storm converged on the valley. Data show the valley hit 90 or more only seven times by the end of May this year -- the second fewest ever on record.

But a high-pressure ridge has settled over the desert Southwest.

What that means is the heat gets trapped between the mountains, which happens to be where most of us live. Temperatures should top 100 today and keep climbing until the forecasters cannot be specific anymore -- into next week at least.

Meteorologists say there's:

■ A 50 percent chance we'll be hotter than normal for entire summer.

■ A 30 percent chance we'll be right around normal.

■ Just a 20 percent chance we'll get a little more relief than normal.

There's even a small chance we could hit 110 degrees early next week, especially in the lower lying parts of the valley.

That's when things get really ugly. Heat stroke, exhaustion, cramps, skin rashes, fainting, dehydration, even death.

But 110 would be unusually hot for early June. In a typical year, the official temperature here hits 110 or more only about nine times a year.

And that's usually concentrated within a single week in July.

So, you've got a month to prepare.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.