U.S. Sets Record for Hottest Month in July

The contiguous United States recorded its hottest month ever in July, with an average temperature of 76.89°F (24.94°C), surpassing the previous record set during the Dust Bowl era in July 1936 by an eighth of a degree, according to multiple reports.

The extreme heat was driven by unusually high nighttime lows, which smashed the old record for hottest minimums by 0.7 degrees. Hotter nights are a classic sign of human-caused climate change, according to scientists and several studies in peer-reviewed literature. The most excessive heat occurred in the Mountain West, Southwest, Northern Plains, and Southeast.

The contiguous United States experienced its hottest month ever in July, with an average temperature of 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This surpassed the previous record set during the Dust Bowl era in July 1936 by an eighth of a degree.

According to CBS News, July was described as 'a wild weather month,' with above-average warmth blanketing the U.S. Several locations in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana saw all-time high temperature records since NOAA started keeping track in 1895. A heat wave that began in early July placed more than 185 million people under heat alerts, including residents of major metropolitan areas like Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

The Guardian reported that the U.S. blistered under three separate heat dome events, where soaring temperatures were held in place over a region by slow-moving high-pressure weather systems. Extreme heat hit much of the U.S. west, the Rockies, upper midwest, the Gulf of Mexico coast, and southeast. Parts of the US spent the month blanketed under a haze of wildfire smoke, with large blazes engulfing forests in Canada and the US’s Pacific northwest.

Scientists attribute the extreme temperatures to human-caused climate change, with fossil fuel combustion identified as a primary factor. The heat-trapping gases released by the burning of coal, oil, and gas are driving up global temperatures and fueling deadly heatwaves that have affected the US and Europe this year.

Meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections stated, '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.'

Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information, noted that every one of the Lower 48 states was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit (nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average. The heat in the Dust Bowl years was more concentrated in parts of the Midwest and was aggravated by agricultural practices at the time, Vose said.

The biggest driver of the record heat was nighttime lows that smashed the old mark for hottest minimums by 0.7 degrees, NOAA said. Hotter nights are a classic sign of human-caused climate change, according to scientists and several studies in peer-reviewed literature. NOAA's calculation is based on averaging 24 hours of temperature, not just highs or lows.

The Trump Administration reduced NOAA’s workforce in 2025, and subsequently proposed steep cuts to the agency’s funding, hampering its ability to monitor weather conditions, analyze patterns, and provide forecasts. The National Weather Service (NWS), which operates under NOAA, lost roughly 600 employees—about 15% of its workforce—through layoffs, buyouts and retirements. It must now respond to increasingly severe weather events with reduced resources.

The administration later proposed cutting NOAA’s overall budget by $1.6 billion, or roughly 26%, compared with fiscal year 2025. The NWS tracks weather in multiple ways—including the installation of surface stations at over 900 airports that provide 24/7 real-time surface weather observations, as well as weather balloons, marine buoys, and satellites.

Those observations feed forecast models that help meteorologists understand developing weather patterns and anticipate dangerous conditions. Extended periods of high day and nighttime temperature conditions create cumulative stress on the human body, increasing the risk of illness and death from heat exposure, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In the United States, the NWS considers heat the leading weather-related killer.

The health effects of heat waves were felt acutely this summer. Maryland’s Department of Health said that 2026 was its deadliest heat season on record, with a total of 50 heat-related fatalities since May. The state also recorded over 1,300 heat-related illnesses in that period. At the national level, the Washington Post reported that there were at least 70 deaths related to heat domes in July.

The NWS communicates the danger that high temperatures pose using a Heat Index that describes the “feels like” temperature to the human body based on a combination of heat and humidity. With information from the NWS, local governments are better able to prepare infrastructure and warn vulnerable communities. At the same time, the agencies are better equipped to create and distribute useful resources.

In May, lawmakers expressed concerns over the NWS’s failure to launch 75% of the weather balloons typically sent aloft in Kansas to help measure atmospheric conditions. These balloons carry a device called a radiosonde that is used to collect upper-atmosphere temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind information to support forecasting.

As NOAA faces an uncertain funding future, such tools could become increasingly important to its efforts to maintain forecasting capacity for an increasingly hot planet.