July Was the Hottest Month Ever Recorded in the US

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According to NOA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), past month of JJuly 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States. It surpassed the previous record, set during the Dust Bowl in July 1936.

NOAA’s records date to 1895, making this more than a record-breaking July: July 2026 was the hottest month of any kind in the agency’s 132 years of records. The finding received extensive media coverage, including reports by Oliver Milman in The Guardian and Andrew Freedman at CNN.

It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case. And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the U.S. — just a cataclysmic event in U. S. history. If we’re exceeding records from The Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble.

– Jeff Masters, meteorologist at Yale Climate Connections(source: PBS)

Citing NOAA’s report, CNN’s Freedman writes that the average temperature across the Lower 48 in July was 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average. That was approximately 0.1 to 0.2 degrees warmer than July 1936 and July 2012, which had previously tied for the record.

And the extreme weather has not ended with July. Heat waves and wildfires have continued into August, including major fires in Washington and Oregon. In Spokane, Washington, a wildfire complex damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes.

Milman attributes July’s extraordinary heat in part to persistent heat-dome events, whose effects were intensified by climate change. Wildfires in Canada and the Pacific Northwest also generated smoke and contributed to extreme conditions affecting millions of people.

For more information, check out the original articles listed below.

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