Weatherwise, July 2024 was a doozy.
Palm Springs hit 124 degrees. Alaska had the wettest July on record. Washington DC tied its record for the most consecutive days with temperatures over 100. Hurricane Beryl became the earliest category five hurricane in history. And a Chicago derecho spawned 32 tornadoes in single day.
“All of that happened just in July, which is just astonishing,” says Josh Ward, field meteorologist for Washington State University’s AgWeatherNet.
Last year was another year for weather extremes in the United States, Ward notes. As of November 1, the nation experienced 24 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion each in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global warming is contributing to the increase in weather-related disasters.
Ward graduated from the University of North Carolina Asheville in May and moved to Eastern Washington in September. Had he stayed in Asheville, he would have witnessed the catastrophic flooding in western North Carolina that followed Hurricane Helene’s September 26 landfall in Florida and the storm’s destructive path through the Southeast.
Looking ahead for the Northwest, Ward says the weak La Niña developing will mean a cold, snowy winter.
Meanwhile, NOAA has reported that fall 2024 was the warmest on record for the United States. “Another record broken,” Ward says. “We are in the decade of breaking records for weather, I do believe. So be on the lookout for that in the future.”
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