- This fall has brought abnormally high temperatures to parts of the United States.
- But some states have seen their record hottest fall month occur over a hundred years ago.
- Peak historical temperatures range from nearly 99 degrees Fahrenheit in Alabama to just over 50 degrees Fahrenheit in Alaska.
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This year has been a hot one – with 2019 predicted to be one of the hottest on record. This fall, the southeast is seeing some serious heat as summer-like conditions simply won’t retreat, and October is expected to reach record highs.
While temperatures are expected to leap 10 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit above average across the Deep South up to the Ohio Valley, this isn’t the first time that the US has seen some especially hot fall months.
Across the Dakotas, Idaho, and Minnesota, heat peaked over 120 years ago as September 1897 brought exceptionally warm state-wide average temperatures. Flash forward to 1939, and five states in the Midwest and south saw a scorching September.
Even as recently as 2015, Connecticut, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Wyoming all saw substantially higher temperatures than normal for September (perhaps not shocking, as 2015 is the second hottest year on record currently). Utah beat its record just last year.
As humans inject more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, scientists expect temperatures to rise 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years, so we'll likely see many more heat records broken in the decades to come.
Here's a breakdown of the hottest fall months ever recorded in each state, and the year that those temperatures broke out, according to data from NOAA. Interestingly, most of them occurred in September.
