August Was World's Hottest On Record As El Nino Grows; U.S. Had Hottest Summer

The world had its  hottest August on record. Only
tiny areas on the map are blue, which is a little on the 
cool side of normal. All the orange is warmer than
normal. Dark orange is a record hot month. 

New data released this week show that the world endured its August on record, beating out a tie between 2023 and 2024.  

The hot August was a big contributor to what turned out to be the world's hottest summer on record. Global oceans, taken as a whole, were also at record warmth. 

The United States also had its hottest August, and hottest summer on record. 

HOT WORLD

This all comes from NOAA's National Centers for Environment Information. Every month, NCEI is among a handful of meteorological agencies that take detailed temperatures of the world. Copernicus, the European climatological agency, also deemed August, 2026 the hottest on record. 

August, 2026 broke the record for hottest by 0.14 degrees F., according to NOAA's assessment. That doesn't sound like much, but it's a pretty wide margin if you add up all the thousands of weather stations that measure temperatures daily.

If you want a long, depressing trend, I've got one for you. This is the 48th consecutive year the world has seen an August warmer than the 20th century average, The top ten hottest Augusts have all happened since 2016.

The hot August comes from an amalgamation of data from throughout the world. Some were sort of hot, some were very hot, some were record hot, and a very, very few were a little on the chilly side. Taken together, we have confirmation of our record hot global August

Regions that experienced a record hot August included large swaths of Greenland, northern and central Africa, southern and western Europe, northwest Asia and much of the western United States. Reflecting the El Nino conditions, a huge area of the eastern and central tropical Pacific also had record warmth. 

Even in the warmest months, you can find pockets of relatively cool weather. Parts of the Arctic, eastern Russia and Antarctica had an August that was a tad cooler than the 20th century average. But not by much. 

The world had its warmest June-August period on record as well. That's meteorological summer in the northern hemisphere and meteorological winter in the southern hemisphere. The records for all of the above go back 177 years

 UNITED STATES

All of the continental United States had a warm month
North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Indiana were only
slightly warmer than normal. California, Nevada,
Colorado and New Mexico had the hottest August.

August was also the hottest on record in the United States, as was the summer as a whole. The average temperature across all of the Lower 48, if you aggregate all the established weather stations, was 75.6 degrees. Daytime maximums set an all time record to averaging 88.6 degrees across the continental U.S.   

The records go back 132 years

California, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado had their hottest August on record. Seventeen other states had one of their top 10 warmest Augusts.

Nobody in the United States had a cooler than average August North Dakota came closest, having its 58th warmest August on record. 

Here in Vermont, we had our 23rd hottest August, so I guess we escaped the worst of a torrid month. 

It was both stuffy warm nights and torrid afternoons that gave us the hot August. While there were plenty of daily record highs set across the U.S. in August, there wasn't the all-time highs you often see in super warm months. 

August also lacked any real cool spells anywhere in the Lower 48.

Another factor in creating such a hot month were those nights. This happened everywhere in the continental United States. But it was especially noticeable in the lower Great Lakes. That region was along a sort of borderline between especially hot weather to the south, with somewhat more moderate air to the north. 

The cloudy, humid weather in Indiana that cooled afternoons and made nights stuffy gave the state its 44th coolest average maximum temperatures on record. But it also gave Indiana the 28th warmest average minimum temperatures. Add it all up and it was Indiana's 49th hottest August out of the past 132 years.

Indiana was in the epicenter of bad weather in the United States. Indiana and neighborhood Ohio had their wettest August on record. A band extending west to east from Utah to New Jersey, with dry conditions north and south of that band.

Summer and Looking Ahead

Summer in the United States was also the hottest on record. June was warmer than normal. July was the hottest on record in the Lower 48. And, as noted above, August was hottest on record.  The previous record hot summers were a tie between 2021 and 1936

That Dust Bowl summer of 1936 is still regarded by many as the benchmark for hot summers, despite what happened in 2021 and now 2026.

The summer of 1936 certainly had its extreme hot spells, hotter than anything we saw in 2026.  

The summer of 1936 still holds the record for the hottest temperatures on record in eight states. However, it wasn't hot everywhere. The 1936 heat was focused on the Plains States. The Pacific Northwest and New England actually had a cool summer in 1936,.

During August, 2026, the heat wasn't as extreme, but it was far more widespread. There were 1.541 record highs set or tied at weather stations across the Lower 48 compared to kist 87 record low temperatures. That's about as big an imbalance as I've ever seen. 

The summer heat has become a trend this decade in the United States, as climate change worsens. Four of the five hottest summers in the United States have occurred in the past five years, according to NOAA data. 

AUTUMN

 When El Nino takes hold, autumn in the United States are often unusually warm. Especially with climate change holding court. 

The first 10 days of September have featured torrid, often record-breaking hot weather across the southern third of the United States. The rest of the United States have so far mostly lacked the usual cool spells that often spill across the border from Canada we usually see this time of year. 

NOAA predicted a warm September for most of the nation, except in the Pacific Northwest and possibly New England. Overall, autumn is predicted to be warm across most of the Lower 48, especially in the northern Rockies.