The sizzling temperature pace set nationally in recent years continued in 2025, as the contiguous 48 United States experienced its fourth-hottest annual average temperature on record. As reported by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) on January 13, the 48-state temperature of 54.64°F for 2025 placed fourth behind 2024, 2012, and 2016. The average for 2025 came in 2.63°F above the average of 52.01°F for the entire 20th century (1901-2000).
Across the entire 131 years of U.S. recordkeeping, the ten warmest years are now packed into the last two decades, and nine of those years have occurred since 2011. For over half a century, the Dust Bowl year of 1934 reigned as the nation’s hottest on record, but since 2015, most years have ranked warmer than 1934.
The annual-scale warmth is especially impressive given that the year got off to a relatively chilly start. But the consistent warmth that arrived in springtime — and especially from autumn onward — made the difference. The latter part of December was astonishingly warm in many parts of the country, including the warmest Christmas Day national average (December 25) by a margin of 3°F.
Month by month, the 48-state average played out this way:
January: 33rd coldest
February: 54th warmest
March: 6th warmest
April: 13th warmest
May: 26th warmest
June: 7th warmest
July: 19th warmest
August: 27th warmest
September: 7th warmest
October: 7th warmest
November: 4th warmest
December: 5thwarmest
Consistency also pushed 2025’s heat over the top on a state-by-state basis. Two states – Nevada and Utah – experienced their warmest year on record, as did the four-state Southwest region as a whole, and every state made it into its respective Top 30 list for heat.
About three times as many record highs as record lows
Independent meteorologist Guy Walton, who publishes at guyonclimate.com and on Bluesky as @climateguyw, has compiled and analyzed local heat records from the United States and beyond for more than 15 years, cowriting peer-reviewed papers on the topic. According to preliminary NOAA/NCEI data as analyzed by Walton, locations across the 50 U.S. states set or tied 38,956 daily record highs in 2025 compared to 13,204 daily record lows — meaning that there were close to three times as many record daily highs as there were lows. The ratio was even more skewed in the more rarefied categories of monthly record highs vs. lows (2,572 vs. 296) and all-time record highs vs. lows (135 vs. 17).
A drier-than-average 2025 for the nation as a whole
The year 2025 ranked as the 40th driest on record when averaged across the 48 contiguous states. This national-scale level of dryness wasn’t especially unusual, although it did mean that five of the last six years have fallen below the long-term increase in nationwide precipitation (see Fig. 3).
Precipitation records are almost always more variable in time and space than temperature records, and this year was no exception. The Great Plains and the Tennessee and Ohio valleys were among the few areas that racked up heavier-than-average precipitation for 2025 (Kentucky had its 10th wettest year on record). An absence of hurricane landfalls in 2025 for the first time in a decade (see below) contributed to drier-than-average conditions for the year along most of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, particularly Florida, which had its 11th driest year on record.
Flood and fire produced the deadliest and most damaging U.S. weather/climate disasters of 2025
The year 2025 brought 23 weather-related U.S. disasters that each topped at least $1 billion in damage, according to the U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters website. The site was adopted by Climate Central last October after it had been discontinued by NOAA, its original creator, last May. Adam Smith, who had served as lead NOAA scientist on the project over the last 15 years, continues to lead the project at its new home at Climate Center, where he is now senior climate impacts scientist.
The billion-dollar disasters of 2025 caused a total of 276 direct fatalities. Their estimated cost, according to Climate Central, is $311 billion (USD 2026). This puts the year in eighth place among the 46 years of data after adjusting for inflation. The year’s tally of 23 billion-dollar events was the third highest in the 46-year database.
The costliest event of the year by far was a series of cataclysmic wildfires that ravaged more than 57,000 acres (89 square miles) across the Los Angeles area in early January (see photo at top). As reported by Climate Central, the total direct losses were estimated to excdeed $60 billion, making it by far the nation’s most expensive wildfire disaster in modern records. Most of the damage was wreaked by the massive Eaton and Palisades fires, which together destroyed more than 12,000 structures.
In a classic and tragic sequence, two wet years had led to abundant grasses and shrubs that then dried out in the months leading up to the fires. Virtually no rain had fallen over the area from May through December 2024, the second-driest such stretch in records going back to 1877. Topping things off, an unusually potent wind-making weather setup arrived in early January, pushing fierce winds far deeper into the Los Angeles area than usual.
READ: The role of climate change in the catastrophic 2025 Los Angeles fires
At least 31 people were killed in the L.A. fires, but as with many such disasters, the indirect toll was far greater. One study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in August estimated that the fires contributed to at least 440 deaths. These deaths were related to such factors as smoke inhalation, which complicated cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, and physical and mental health emergencies in which response was compromised by fire-related disruption.
An event that didn’t make the billion-dollar disaster list, but that produced the year’s highest direct/immediate death toll from a U.S. weather disaster, was the catastrophic flash flooding that peaked early on the July 4 holiday along the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country. At least 138 people died in the floods, most of them on the Fourth, when torrential rains that fell from a slow-moving thunderstorm complex triggered a rapid rise along the Guadalupe that inundated cabins, vehicles, and campgrounds.
A three-hour rainfall total of around 6.5 inches (170 mm) was recorded in the predawn hours along the Guadalupe at Hunt, at a location ideally positioned to flood the narrow canyon just downstream. (An even larger five-day total of 20.32 inches for July 3-8 was estimated near Bertram, about 100 miles to the northeast of the Guadalupe flood.) These rains were fed by the remnants of former Tropical Storm Barry, which had moved north over several days after its landfall in northeast Mexico.
Although a flash flood warning had been issued along the Guadalupe by the National Weather Service several hours ahead of the worst flooding, multiple weak or missing links in the warning-to-response process left dozens of people, including many children, unaware of the grave danger and unable to evacuate once the flooding struck full force. The event was the deadliest U.S. flash flood in 49 years, and it marked the latest in a string of weather-disaster tolls that would once have been considered unlikely or even unimaginable in the 21st century.
READ: ‘Deadliest in generations’: The Texas floods are the latest in a disturbing pattern
The Texas floods also followed several months of intense drought — a premier example of the “weather whiplash” that’s been increasing as a warming climate boosts hydrologic extremes. The syndrome both increases the impacts of drought, mainly through landscape-parching heat, while also forcing more water to evaporate into the atmosphere, which raises the odds of intensified rainfall events.
READ: The science behind Texas’ catastrophic floods
U.S. tornadoes: A busy but not-super-destructive year, and the first EF5 in more than a decade
Based on preliminary local reports compiled by the NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center, an estimated 1559 tornadoes plowed across the U.S. landscape in 2025. This is substantially above the 2005-2015 average of 1402, and the third-highest total in a separate analysis dating back to 2010.
The tornado death toll of 67 in 2026 was close to the recent annual average of around 69. The deadliest single tornado crashed through Laurel County in southeastern Kentucky after dark on May 16. This mile-wide tornado, which peaked at EF4 on the enhanced Fujita scale, took 17 lives. The tornado’s location east of the Mississippi and its arrival after dark exemplify two dangerous ongoing trends. The areas of peak tornado activity are tending to shift from Tornado Alley of the Southern Great Plains toward the mid- and lower Mississippi Valley and points east, where rural populations are more dense than in the Plains and often lack easy access to robust shelter. Moreover, tornado season here often starts by late winter; this pushes more hours of potential twister development into the nighttime period, when visibility is poor (especially in forested areas).
Of the year’s fatalities, 25 (about 40%) occurred in mobile/manufactured homes, which are especially vulnerable in tornadic winds.
READ: Climate change and tornadoes: Any connection?
Another tornado – one that took three lives but caused relatively little property damage, striking near Enderlin, North Dakota, on June 20, 2025 – made history by ending a highly publicized record-long “drought” of top-end tornadoes, those ranked as EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Prior to this event, the last EF5 tornado had struck more than 12 years earlier, in Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20, 2013. Research published online just months before the Enderlin tornado suggested that the unprecedented absence of EF5 twisters could be related to changes in how single-family-home destruction was rated before and after the switch from the original Fujita Scale to the Enhanced Fujita Scale.
READ: New study reveals potential cause of a drought in violent EF5 tornadoes
Hurricanes steered clear of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, but two former tropical cyclones contributed to havoc in Texas and Alaska
As summarized by Jeff Masters in a 2025 season wrap-up post on December 1, four out of this year’s five Atlantic hurricanes reached Category 4 or 5—the highest percentage on record for any Atlantic season. However, prevailing steering currents kept all of those behemoths away from U.S. shores. This was the first year since 2015 that not a single hurricane made landfall on the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
The only system to reach the nation while still an active named storm was Tropical Storm Chantal, which brought 50-mph sustained winds to northeastern South Carolina on July 6. Torrential rains from slow-moving Chantal struck North Carolina, and the storm led to $500 million in damage while taking three lives.
A great deal of additional U.S. impact came from two named storms – one from the Atlantic and one from the Northwest Pacific – that affected the nation long after they had gone post-tropical. As noted above, the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry fueled the catastrophic floods in Central Texas in early July, almost a week after Barry’s landfall in Mexico. And in Alaska, the remnants of Typhoon Halong caused widespread destruction in a number of Native Alaskan communities along and near the state’s southwest coast. More than 1500 people were forced from their homes, and record storm surge flooded many structures in the town of Kipnuk.
https://bsky.app/profile/alaskapublic.org/post/3mbp6fhjyhj2o
An autumn feast for skywatching eyes
Perhaps the most captivating atmospheric event of 2025 wasn’t too destructive at all – except maybe to the pride of aurora lovers who missed out on it. A fast-evolving pair of coronal mass ejections from the sun, the second one moving faster than the first, teamed up for a “cannibal” solar storm that led to an impressive northern-lights sky show across much of the United States and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, especially on November 11-12.
Arriving with only a few hours of notice, the event was photographed by countless people using cellphone cameras that can now capture auroras in far more vivid colors than the naked human eye can detect. So don’t despair — your friend who saw the aurora while you missed out may not have gotten quite as much of a visual treat as their phone pix might suggest!
Jeff Masters contributed to this post.
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