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| A time/temperature sign on a St. Albans, Vermont bank building on a record hot day in June, 2025. Record highs greatly outpaced record lows across the United States last year. |
That's especially true in the realm of weather and climate.
Weather stations across the United States break tens of thousands of record highs and record lows each year. The recently ended 2025 was no exception.
But, all those records last year reveal yet another sign of climate change.
If the climate wasn't changing, the number of record highs and record lows should be roughly equal. Sure, certain months might have more record highs or record lows if there's a persistent weather pattern.
But those persistent patterns rarely last longer than a month. Two at the very most. By the time you count up an entire year, you should get a general match between record highs and record lows.
In recent years, at least here in the United States and almost surely in the rest of the world, record highs are far outpacing record lows.
The year 2025 certainly demonstrated that. There were about 2.5 times the number of daily record high temperatures, and record high daily overnight lows than records the cold side.
The precise numbers were 41,792 record highs and 17,638 record lows.
You might get different figures from different sources depending on how many weather stations were analyzed. In this case and most others, the weather stations that were looked at had decades of records to look back upon.
If a weather station was up and running for only, say five years, that station would constantly break high and low temperatures, and would not be representative of any particular trend. The Southeast Regional Climate Center, which compiled the statistics, didn't include weather stations that have only been operating for a few decades or less.
2025 COMPARED AND HIGHLIGHTS
While record highs far outpaced record lows in 2025, the previous two years were even more extreme. In 2024 there were 4.5 times as many record highs as record lows. In 2023 there were about three times as many as record highs compared to lows, the Washington Post reports.
Also, in January, 2025, for the first time since May, 2023, there were more cold records than hot records. (1,370 record highs to 1,893 record lows). Almost all the January record lows, about 1,500 of them, hit during one six day cold snap between January 19 and 23.
An El Nino was underway for much of 2023 and pretty much all of 2024, which tends to make the United States hotter. That probably explains why the hot vs.cold records were more lopsided in those years than in 2025.
The most out of whack month in 2025 was December, with 5,684. Most of the western United States had a record hot December, which explains that high number of records. March and April were also full of record highs. Each month had more than 4,200 record highs.
Of the cities in the Lower 48 with records going back to the late 1800s, Brownsville, Texas had the most record highs, with 32 of them. Most of those records came in the final three months of the year. However, Honolulu, Hawaii beat out Brownsville with 50 record highs. Thirty-one of those Honolulu record highs were for warm overnight lows
Fort Wayne, Indiana and Sioux City, Iowa had the most record lows, with just six each.
This first few days of 2026 are picking up where last year left off. There have been numerous record highs, mostly across the South so far this month. We have a couple more days of record highs go. There are signs parts of the U.S. could get a spate of record lows later this month.
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