Hot in the city: This summer has set records for heat in Boston

Sal Giarratani, 70, from East Boston got some sun on Wollaston Beach earlier this month.Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff

The summer of 2018 has been one of southern New England’s hottest in nearly 150 years, according to the National Weather Service.

With just over a week left of meteorological summer, which ends Aug. 31, meteorologists are looking back on the last three months and putting them into context, and the numbers reflect what everyone across the region has been experiencing — this season has been a hot, humid mess.

Already, Boston has set a record for the greatest number of summer days with low temperatures of 70 degrees or warmer, and it looks likely to be one of the 10 hottest summers in the city since record keeping began here in 1872, the weather service said in a series of posts on Twitter.

(Coincidentally, 1872 is also the year the Boston Globe was founded.)

Boston looks likely to set a record for the greatest number of days in the entire year with a low at or above 70 degrees — so far there have been 26, and the old record, set in 1983, was 30.

The city still has some distance to go before it matches some other records set in the very hot year of 1983, when there were 30 days with highs at or above 90 degrees — there have been 16 so far in 2018 — and 83 days with highs at or above 80, compared to just 60 so far this year.

Of course, the heat doesn’t stop when you drive out to the suburbs, or when you cross the Massachusetts state line. People have been suffering all across the region.

Providence has also set a record for the most low temperatures at or above 70 degrees, and in Hartford, the high temperature was at or above 80 degrees for every day in July — the first time that has happened since records began there in 1905, according to the service.