Like Every Month Lately, Hot Times Continued For World In March, Which Was 3rd Hottest. U.S. Hot, Too!

As always in this age of climate change, it was
hard to find cool spots on Earth as March came
in as the globe's third hottest on record. 

 As we do every month, we're checking in with the global climate checkup for the previous month, and as always, we endured hot times in March. 

March, 2025 turned out to be the third hottest on record for Earth. 

Thanks in part to the now-definitely fading away La Nina, which cools the Earth a little, we've temporarily stopped having record hot months over and over again. Instead, we're "merely" scoring in the top five, usually top three or two.

This temporary "cooling" if you can call it that, means that at this point 2025 only has a 6 percent chance of besting last year as the world's hottest on record. 

These "nearly hottest" months we've had this year are still obviously bad news since it's a sign that climate change is continuing unfettered, despite influences that would normally cool Earth just a wee bit. 

If you are under the age of 49, you've never seen a March that was close in temperatures to the 20th century average. They've all been warm since 1977.

Unless there's something awful like a major meteor hit or global nuclear war, you'll never again see a month or year that is close to the temperatures we usually saw four or five decades ago. 

The hottest spots on Earth, relative to average, were the Arctic, Alaska, the eastern and central United States, most of Europe, northwest Africa and Australia. 

If you were looking for relative cool spots, they were - as usual - few and far between, but you would have found them in central Canada, eastern Greenland, parts of eastern Asia and chunks of Antarctica.

Those areas weren't really much cooler than what the pre-industrial average was, but were definitely chillier than the average of the past 30 years, which of course had been warmed by climate change. 

As previously reported, Arctic sea ice was at its lowest level on record for March. 

UNITED STATES

The Lower 48 in the U.S. had a decidedly warm March - its sixth warmest on record. 

All states came out definitely on the warm side except California and Florida, which were a little closer to the long term average. . 

Eighteen states had one of their top ten warmest Marches on record in 2025. Vermont as a whole was listed as having had its 13th warmest March on record. However, in Burlington, specifically, the state's main weather station tied for the sixth warmest March.

If you averaged out precipitation through the Lower 48  it comes out fair to middling, ending up close to the long term average. 

Though overall March was near normal for U.S. precipitation, as usual, some spots were extra wet, while others were especially dry.   

Wisconsin and Michigan had among their wettest Marches on record. West Virginia had its fifth driest March on record.

Here in Vermont, we had our 38th wettest March out of the past 131 years, so nothing extreme here. 

Though the United States as a whole wasn't particularly rainy, it was a stormy month. The United States had 296 tornadoes in March, close to if not the most on record for the month.