NOAA says July was warmest month in US history, surpassing 1936 Dust Bowl heat

FOX Local
Published August 10, 2026 7:46 PM EDT

FILE - People spend time at Washington Square Park during hot weather in New York City, United States, on June 29, 2026. (Photo by Selçuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The Brief

    • July was the hottest month ever recorded across the contiguous United States, NOAA said.
    • The average temperature reached 76.89 degrees, surpassing the previous July record from 1936.
    • Scientists say unusually warm nights helped drive the record heat and are consistent with human-caused climate change.

The United States saw its hottest month ever in July, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Excluding Alaska and Hawaii, the U.S. averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit, eclipsing the Dust Bowl’s July 1936 record by an eighth of a degree. 

Why you should care:

"It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case," said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections. "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."

The heat was so widespread 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, said Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information.

Humans are causing this recent heat wave

Dig deeper:

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.

What's happening now is due to the burning of coal, oil and gas, scientists 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 years 2021 and 1936 tie for America's hottest summer, which is June through August. Through July, 2026 is a shade cooler than 2021, which was powered by record heat in June.

The Source: Information for this article was taken from The Associated Press and the NOAA. 

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