I have no evidence to back this up, but for the summer temperature rank (high, top 5) at many sites there seemed to be a lack of heat headlines from the NWS. At least up here, I feel like 2017 had more heat advisories up at BTV, as that was also a top tier summer. I know Snowman is good at finding number of advisories/warnings stuff like that, but it would be interesting to see how this year compared to other years in NWS headlines.