U.S. just had its hottest summer in 132 years, topping the Dust Bowl-era record

The United States has just recorded its hottest summer in 132 years of federal weather record-keeping, surpassing a mark set during the Dust Bowl of 1936, according to data released this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information. The average temperature across the contiguous 48 states from June through August was 74.4 degrees Fahrenheit, 3 degrees above the 20th-century average and four-tenths of a degree warmer than the previous record years of 1936 and 2021.

The finding arrived alongside a second, related milestone: August 2026 was the warmest August ever measured in the United States, with an average temperature of 75.6 degrees and average daytime highs of 88.6 degrees, both records for the month. NOAA's monthly report also showed the summer was unusually dry, compounding the heat with an expanding drought that now covers more than half the country.

The numbers behind the record

NOAA's national temperature dataset stretches back to 1895, giving federal climatologists 132 years of comparable summer records. This year's mark edged out 1936, the year most associated with the Dust Bowl, and 2021, when a historic Western heat dome pushed the Pacific Northwest into triple digits. Precipitation nationwide totaled 8.11 inches for the summer, about a fifth of an inch below the 20th-century average and in the driest third of the 132-year record; August alone brought just 2.30 inches, the driest August since 2000.

The heat was not distributed evenly. California, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado each posted their warmest August on record, and Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado all had their warmest summers ever measured, according to NOAA. California and New Mexico also set records for daytime highs, while six Western states recorded their warmest overnight lows, a pattern climatologists say reduces the nighttime cooling that both people and crops depend on for relief. Precipitation extremes ran the opposite direction: Indiana and Ohio recorded their wettest Augusts, roughly double their normal rainfall, while Texas and Oklahoma logged among their driest, with less than 30 percent of normal rainfall, according to a summary of the report by Al Jazeera. California had its fifth-driest summer on record and its driest since 2002.

Four of the last five U.S. summers now rank among the hottest ever recorded, a run that climate scientists attribute to the long-term warming trend from fossil-fuel emissions layered on top of natural year-to-year variability, according to reporting compiled by Yale Climate Connections, which also tracked the year-to-date national average through August at 57.98 degrees, itself a record for the January-through-August period.

Drought, shrinking reservoirs and a fire season running hot

The heat has been accompanied by a rapid expansion of drought. The U.S. Drought Monitor, jointly produced by NOAA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Drought Mitigation Center, showed drought covering 59.1 percent of the contiguous United States by September 1, an increase of more than 10 percentage points in a single month, with nearly four-fifths of the Lower 48 classified as at least abnormally dry. Puerto Rico has fared worse still, with more than three-quarters of the territory in drought and roughly 40 percent in extreme drought.

That dryness is visible at two of the country's largest reservoirs. Federal data published by the Bureau of Reclamation shows Lake Mead, on the Colorado River behind Hoover Dam, at roughly 26 percent of capacity as of September 9, among the lowest levels the reservoir has seen in decades. Lake Powell, upstream on the Colorado, sat at about 22 percent of capacity the same day. Both reservoirs supply water and hydropower to tens of millions of people across seven states and Mexico, and both have been under mandatory shortage restrictions for several years as the basin's long-running drought has deepened.

The dry heat has also fed one of the more active wildfire seasons in nearly a decade. Nationwide, more than 8.3 million acres had burned by early September, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, running well above the 10-year average pace for the date. Large fires in the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest have strained state and federal firefighting resources through the late summer, adding smoke and evacuation orders to the list of hardships in a season already marked by heat advisories and water restrictions across much of the West and Southwest.

A global pattern, and a warning about what comes next

Federal climatologists and international forecasters say the record is unfolding against the backdrop of a strengthening El Nino, the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that tends to push global temperatures higher. At a press briefing in Geneva earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization said the current El Nino could intensify into one of the strongest on record over the coming months.

"If this trajectory continues, it may be stronger than anything since our monitoring began, so literally off the charts we have used for the past four decades," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo told reporters.

The WMO said forecasts put the odds of El Nino persisting into early 2027 at nearly 100 percent, the highest confidence level the agency has issued in such an update. For the southern and southwestern United States, a strong El Nino typically brings a wetter winter, which forecasters and water managers in the Colorado River basin are watching as a potential, if partial, source of relief for reservoirs and topsoil moisture heading into next year. It is far from a certainty, and NOAA's own outlooks caution that a wet winter would still leave the basin's multi-decade deficit largely unresolved.

In the nearer term, farmers, ranchers and water utilities across the Plains, the Southwest and parts of the South are contending with the immediate fallout of the dry summer. Reduced Colorado River allocations have already forced cutbacks in agricultural water deliveries in Arizona and parts of California in recent years, and persistently low reservoirs make further rounds of cuts more likely if the coming winter does not deliver substantial snowpack. Municipal utilities in fast-growing Southwestern metro areas have leaned on conservation programs and, in some cases, temporary outdoor watering restrictions to stretch supplies through the hottest months.

NOAA's climate scientists are expected to fold the summer 2026 figures into the agency's broader annual assessment later this year, when 2026 will be evaluated against other recent years for the national and global temperature rankings. In the meantime, the immediate questions facing officials are practical ones: how much snow accumulates in the Rocky Mountains this winter, how the Colorado River basin's shortage-sharing agreements hold up under continued strain, and whether the fire season now underway in parts of the West eases before autumn rains and cooler weather arrive.