by Bob Henson, Yale Climate Connections
September 9, 2026

The 48 contiguous United States have just achieved an unhappy trifecta: the warmest August, warmest summer, and warmest calendar year to date in 131 years of national recordkeeping. Both the monthly and seasonal records were set by unusually big margins.

The August climate report from the National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI, tells the story in grimly heated detail.

• August 2026: The 48-state average temperature of 75.58°F came in 0.54°F above the next-warmest August (1983).
• Summer (June-August 2026): The 48-state average of 74.37°F ended up 0.39°F warmer than the summers of both 1936 and 2021. All of the Four Corners states (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah) saw their warmest summers on record.
• Year to date (January-August 2026): The 48-state average of 57.98°F was 0.08°F above the previous record-holding year to date, 2012.

As shown in Fig. 1, a large swath of the western U.S. – including every state across the Southwest, from California to Texas and Oklahoma, as well as Wyoming and Montana – is experiencing its warmest year on record. Averaged across all 48 states, 2026 has also brought the warmest March and July on record. More than a third of Americans got their warmest single March day on record locally, and July was the warmest single month in contiguous U.S. history.

This year’s record-smashing U.S. heat hasn’t occurred just at ground level. Temperatures above the 48 contiguous states through the lowest few miles of the atmosphere, called the lower troposphere, set records for the warmest summer and the warmest year to date.

The nation and world are in a dramatic transition year from a moderate La Niña event in 2025-26 to a likely record-beating El Niño event for 2026-27. Precipitation across the 48 states reflects a mixed but dry-leaning year to date. Few states were record-dry or record-wet for either August, summer 2026, or the year to date, although recurrent rounds of showers and thunderstorms made it the wettest August on record for Indiana and Ohio.

For the 48 states as a whole, the year to date through August has been the 13th-driest in 132 years of recordkeeping. The area-averaged precipitation of 18.56 inches for the year so far is running more than 10% below the long-term average.

Will El Niño bring the drought relief the South and West desperately need?

Sitting at just 26% and 21% of their respective capacities as of September 8, Lake Mead and Lake Powell have reached their lowest water levels since these reservoirs were built and filled in the late 20th century.

The broader U.S. drought picture isn’t looking great either. As of its weekly report on September 1, the U.S. Drought Monitor showed 79% of the contiguous U.S. in abnormally dry conditions and 59% in some form of drought. Both indexes are only a few percentage points short of their record-high values of 88% and 65%, respectively, across the 26 years since the Drought Monitor debuted.

El Niño winters typically bring wetter-than-average conditions to the southern half of the contiguous United States. And the odds of this outcome get increasingly higher the stronger the El Niño event. So there’s real reason for hope that parched landscapes, rivers, and reservoirs in the Southwest U.S. will get much-needed relief over the next few months – keeping in mind that any such relief won’t be enough to fix the longer-term issues dogging water supply in this ever-growing and ever-warming region.

An unwelcome surge in wildfire this summer

Through September 8, a total of 53,665 U.S. wildfires had burned through 8,397,760 acres in 2026. Both statistics are the largest to date for any year since at least 2016 in online records from the National Interagency Fire Center.

This year’s two largest wildfires to date are also the largest in the history of Nebraska (the Morrill Fire of mid-to-late March, which torched more than 640,000 acres) and Oregon (the Big Grass Fire of late July through early September, which has burned more than 578,000 acres, including parts of adjacent Idaho).

The total U.S. acreage burned to date this year is about 30% above the 10-year average, as noted on September 8 in an in-depth report by Grist magazine: “America is losing its war against wildfire.” As the subtitle puts it, “Wildland firefighting is increasingly facing an intractable reality: We’re stuck in a vicious cycle. A doom loop.”

One sign of hope: on September 9, the National Interagency Coordination Center stated that continued “improving fire weather conditions across multiple geographic areas” had allowed it to lower its preparedness level to a three on a scale of one to five. The preparedness level had been at the highest Level 5 for 48 days ending on September 4, meaning that firefighting efforts had been severely strained. As of September 9, about 14,000 firefighters and support personnel were responding to wildfires, down about a factor of two from their mid-August peak.

Jeff Masters and Irene Sans contributed to this post.

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